Jennifer Egan Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.

  Jennifer Egan

  Memories, Past, Thinking

  3 Copy quote

• We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

  Jennifer Egan

  Hurt, Party, People

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.65, Anchor

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• I was a stepchild in two different families. The hardest thing about being a stepchild is you know that in some way everything would be easier if you didnt exist.

  Jennifer Egan

  Two, Different, Would Be

  59 Copy quote

• Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.

  Jennifer Egan

  Children, Vitamins, Rich

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.31, Anchor

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• a swell of gratitude and appreciation for his assistant, as opposed to the murderous rage he felt toward the rest of his staff

  Jennifer Egan

  Gratitude, Appreciation, Assistants

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.21, Anchor

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• What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.

  Jennifer Egan

  People, Fifty, Realizing

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.257, Anchor

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• reach isn’t describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: it’s simultaneous.

  Jennifer Egan

  Causes, Simultaneous, Cause And Effect

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.257, Anchor

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• I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.

  Jennifer Egan

  Glasses, Differences, Imagination

  3 Copy quote

• When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

  Jennifer Egan

  Missing, Everyday, Alive

  "Dealing with the Dead" by Jennifer Egan, www.newyorker.com. October 11, 2010.

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• th blu nyt th stRs u can't c th hum tht nevr gOs awy

  Jennifer Egan

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• I felt more doubtful than usual with 'Goon Squad,' because I knew that the book's genre wasn't easily named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.

  Jennifer Egan

  Book, Squad, Usual

  22 Copy quote

• But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by "identify," I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.

  Jennifer Egan

  Strong, Writing, Character

  "How 'the Goon Squad' came to be". Interview with Christian DuChateau, www.cnn.com. April 24, 2011.

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• That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.

  Jennifer Egan

  Together, Happened

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.252, Anchor

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• I don't think that all girls seek the influence of older men, but I think girls whose fathers are absent or recessed from their lives often do. And honestly, when I was growing up, fathers were generally pretty absent from their children's lives. We didn't see a lot of them. That may be something that has genuinely changed for the better in our culture: men are more present for their children now that more women are working.

  Jennifer Egan

  Girl, Children, Growing Up

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• I write my first draft by hand, at least for fiction. For non-fiction, I write happily on a computer, but for fiction I write by hand, because I'm trying to achieve a kind of thoughtless state, or an unconscious instinctive state. I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.

  Jennifer Egan

  Reading, Writing, Hands

  Interview with Marah Eakin, www.avclub.com. May 12, 2011.

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• I guess in my own life, privacy, anonymity, and the mystery of being lost are important. I also feel that people are mysterious and complex no matter what they do, and no matter how hard they try to reveal their own mystery.

  Jennifer Egan

  People, Important, Trying

  "Jennifer Egan’s Novel Approach". Interview with Kiera Butler, www.motherjones.com. May 27, 2010.

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• I write fiction longhand. That's not so much about rejecting technology as being unable to write fiction on a computer for some reason. I don't think I would write it on a typewriter either. I write in a very blind gut instinctive way. It just doesn't feel right. There's a physical connection. And then in nonfiction that's not the case at all. I can't even imagine writing nonfiction by hand.

  Jennifer Egan

  Writing, Thinking, Technology

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• Music and time have such an interesting relationship. Music makes time fall away like almost nothing else. You hear a song from another moment of your life and it really is like you're still there. That's why the music of our youth ends up being particularly powerful. The coming of age music that you grab a hold of as the symbol or the expression of your independence and hopes for the future and anger and rebellion or whatever it is you're feeling is so powerful for the rest of your life when you hear it.

  Jennifer Egan

  Song, Powerful, Fall

  "Jennifer Egan’s Novel Approach". Interview with Kiera Butler, www.motherjones.com. May 27, 2010.

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• We're [writers] all afraid of writing badly, and there are psychological reasons, like the bad interior of ourselves is somehow being revealed, but we all fear that, and you can't write well if you're not willing to write badly. That's why you have to make writing a habit, so it feels normal and not strange.

  Jennifer Egan

  Writing, Normal, Strange

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The average person might articulate them differently, but we all think about interpersonal relationships in one way or another. Writers just express that in different ways and capture it in different ways. To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is to hope that your interests in some sense link up with the culture around you.

  Jennifer Egan

  Thinking, Average, Degrees

  Interview with Marah Eakin, www.avclub.com. October 13, 2016.

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