Jennifer Egan Quotes - Page 5

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• And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.

  Jennifer Egan

  War, Men, Two

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.271, Anchor

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• No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.

  Jennifer Egan

  Girl, Waiting, Stories

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.33, Anchor

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• A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.

  Jennifer Egan

  Girl, Years, Lunch

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.128, Anchor

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• Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

  Jennifer Egan

  Writing, Years, Squad

  "Jennifer Egan: 'I would have accepted a marriage proposal from Roger Daltrey on the spot'". Interview with Killian Fox, www.theguardian.com. August 20, 2011.

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• Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.

  Jennifer Egan

  Selfish, Believe, Resilience

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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

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• Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.

  Jennifer Egan

  Time, Goons, Scotty

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• Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn't stemmed the suspicion that people's opinions weren't really their own. "Who's paying you?" was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter - who would let themselves be bought?

  Jennifer Egan

  Laughter, People, Political

  Jennifer Egan (2011). “A Visit From the Goon Squad”, p.251, Hachette UK

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• 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’m sorry and I believe in you and I’ll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I’ll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life.

  Jennifer Egan

  Sorry, Believe, Heart

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.156, Anchor

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• She was clean": no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?

  Jennifer Egan

  Tattoo, Kids, Biceps

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.258, Anchor

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• She'd risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.

  Jennifer Egan

  Results, Core

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.12, Anchor

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• Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

  Jennifer Egan

  Stars, Real, Book

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.262, 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 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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• 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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• 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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