Top 80 Jennifer Egan Quotes

I love the thriller genre generally. I like murder mysteries and those kinds of adventure stories.

I always feel very afraid as I work on books. It’s just so hard to write a decent book!

As a reader and a writer, I’m happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.

I spend so long writing each of my novels that by the time I’m done with one, I’m ready to discover a totally different world.

When I had my first child, I didn’t write for a year, and I felt when I tried to start again I might actually not be able to do it anymore. I really could not do it well, and I felt out of sorts with it.

I often felt like that Mr. Magoo figure in the cartoon, who just wanders through traffic, and somehow it never hits him. I kind of feel that way about my whole childhood: Why do I have a normal life?

For me, New York is about anonymity; that’s the draw. It’s not at all about other people in my business being nearby. It’s that I can get on the subway and eavesdrop on conversations that I would never have access to otherwise. That’s why I stay. That’s why I could never leave.

Remaining a pop phenomenon for 20 years without dying or lapsing into self-parody is quite a feat.

In the case of ‘Goon Squad,’ which sold slowly for a long time despite the good reviews, those ‘best of 2010’ lists were pivotal, and made the book really sell.

I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad,’ though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.

I have a hatred of familiarity. If I feel like I am doing something I’ve done before, it feels old and done. I feel I have no choice but to strike out in directions that feel new – anything less just doesn’t seem worth it.

My first attempt at writing a novel was horrible. I had to throw it away. But I stuck with the idea, which is what became ‘The Invisible Circus.’

I think, for one thing, all of us remember those teenage years and those songs that we fell in love with and the music scene that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we’re back in an earlier moment.

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 didn’t exist.

I try consciously to keep myself entertained and challenged to not repeat myself at all. Like, when I start a new book, my goal is to pretty much throw out what I’ve done and try something completely different that I think initially I cannot do.

That adage about ‘Write what you know’ is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I’m curious to find out.

It’s not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

I felt unbelievably lucky to have the success I did with ‘Goon Squad,’ and I also felt the pressure of how fleeting that success can be.

Technology makes everyone feel old. A laptop is old after two years. Someone always has something newer. Everyone seems to feel obsolete now, even the young.

I’m embarrassed to say this, but I shy away from memoirs. My feeling is always that I’m saving them for later, so I guess that means I’ll reach a point when I read nothing else.

As a journalist, I have wanted very much to find a way to write about the music industry, and it’s been frustrating to me that that’s never worked out.

I’m not sure if the passage of time affects our core identities so much as reveals them to us.

There are a lot of writers who find a groove and spend a career mining that vein. I seem to be exactly the opposite.

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

When I pick up a book that’s, you know, wreathed in laurels, I expect a lot, and that doesn’t give the book its best chance to shine.

I would go so far as to say that I mostly write terrible things. I mean, my first drafts are so appalling.

What lists and awards don’t measure – and I feel this strongly – is the lasting value of any work of art. They’re a snapshot of a moment, and one should always consider their judgments in that context.

Nowadays I’m more interested in what you’d call ‘alternative.’ Lately we’ve been listening to a lot of Mumford & Sons, and Jenny Owen Youngs. I’m also pretty crazy about the Kings of Convenience, a Norwegian band that’s been compared to Simon and Garfunkel.

I’m just interested in serialization in fiction. I’m fascinated by it. I love the 19th-century novels. I’m interested in ways to bring that back to fiction.

One futuristic novel that had a huge impact on me was Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein,’ which is kind of science fiction plus Gothic.

Both my own process and that of the publishing industry are just too slow to do anything other than play catch-up when it comes to anticipating change.

I loved every minute of my childhood – sunbathing on the fire escape, digging for buried treasure in the back yard, pulling alewives out of the sand… Then it was all taken away from me. I came back every summer to visit my father until I was 18, but I was always the outsider.

When I think about a book like ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ which I really loved, the weird hybrid language is what I remember most.

I had this idea that I could hire myself out as a person to go on archeological digs and dig, without any training! I actually wrote to a number of archeology departments and offered up my services.

One of my strengths as a writer is that I’m a good problem-solver. I write these unthinking, ungoverned first drafts. The project for me always is to turn that instinctive stuff into pages that work.

If you’ve been around as long as I have, watching the literary scene, then you know that who’s in and who’s out changes by the year. It’s really a very fluid situation that requires that the person who is having the good luck now isn’t having it a year or two from now.

I was not a punk rocker, absolutely not, but I certainly knew quite a lot of them, and I definitely went to the Mab – it was raw, interesting intense scene, so I was very drawn to it, but I was a total outsider.

I’m not a technophobe, but I’m pretty old fashioned.

Sometimes I’ll watch teenagers and find myself not quite believing I’m older than they are – even wondering, delusionally, if they can see any difference between us.

You can start imagining all kinds of things characters would feel, but you have to have a sense of whether those imaginings might be right.

I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. ‘Goon Squad’ provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out ‘The Who,’ which was my absolute favorite band.

I can’t even imagine writing nonfiction by hand. I think if I didn’t have a computer, I just couldn’t do it. Maybe it’s a brain-section issue.

I don’t really begin with ideas about genre. I certainly wrote a gothic novel, ‘The Keep,’ that conformed to and, in some ways, played with every convention I knew of to work with in the gothic, but the way I came to it was very instinctive and visceral.

After 9/11, the U.S. seemed vulnerable for the first time in a long time. We were no longer the superpower that no other country could touch. I thought, ‘When and how did that dominance begin?’

I did go on safari in Kenya when I was 17, with my mother, stepfather and little brother, and I kept a careful journal of the experience that was very helpful in terms of my sensory impressions of Africa. I have traveled quite a bit at distinct times in my life, though now that I have kids I’ve settled down.

In a way, I started ‘Goon Squad’ not even realizing I was writing a book. I thought I was just writing a few stories to stall before starting this other book that I wanted to write – or thought I wanted to write: I still haven’t written it.

Time is always a component of place; you can’t really talk about where without talking about when.

I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.

The music industry is an interesting lens through which to look at change, because it has had such a difficult time adjusting to the digital age.

I have this dream again and again: I find extra rooms in the place where I live. You could say it’s a very New York dream, but I think it’s about writing – the feeling that there is something behind a wall or a door.

Because you can’t write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That’s how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.

I should say, I don’t write about myself or my life. So for me, in fiction, it’s always been about what I can dream up, that feels far away from me.

I’ve tried writing on a computer thinking it would make me more efficient, but if you’re writing crummy stuff, being efficient is no help.

Invention and memory are so close together in the place they occupy in my brain.

I write to escape from my life. Writing about men separates ‘me’ from my work in a way that I find comforting.

I was obsessed with The Who. I would have accepted a marriage proposal from Roger Daltrey on the spot. I went to all of their shows in San Francisco and some in L.A. That was as close as I got to being a groupie.

I was on a very bumpy plane ride, an overnight flight. I was so miserable, and I pulled out ‘David Copperfield,’ and I forgot how scared and tired I was, and I thought, ‘This is what reading should be.’ I’m utterly transported out of my current situation.

I think literary theory satisfied a deep love I have for big, encompassing narratives about the world and how it works – which are usually, in the end, more creative visions unto themselves than illuminating explanations.

Between books, I have to throw out everything I did before, because the tools I’ve used to write the previous book will not only not work for the next project, they will ruin it.

I grew up as a step-kid, always a little outside, always trying hard to follow and fit in. But over time, I’ve come to feel that my tendency toward self-erasure is a deep and real part of me. I think I’d be this way no matter how I grew up.

I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I’m always trying to access when I write.

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.

I blurb a lot of books by women, and I’m eager to provide encouragement and support for young women.

You can research until you’re falling asleep, but that still doesn’t mean you’re really fluent in the material.

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.

If you can write any way and it’s working out, just bow down in gratitude.

Comparison is painful. Don’t be cowed by other people’s pretty pictures. When you feel unimpressive, or irrelevant, that has nothing to do with what you’re actually capable of.

When I’m not writing, I feel an awareness that something’s missing. If I go a long time, it becomes worse. I become depressed. There’s something vital that’s not happening.

I’ve never been that confident. I don’t tend to think, swaggeringly, ‘I’m going to ace this.’ It’s just not who I am.

The part of the process that’s exciting to me is feeling like I’m in a place I’ve never been before, in every way. Without that, I don’t know if I’d be a writer.

I have a tendency to coddle my sons because I want to keep them safe, but I also want them to be strong and independent and curious and bold, and I worry that my coddling is going to have exactly the opposite effect.

I never did anything original my whole childhood. I was invisible.

I’m a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.

Training readers to expect a voice or subject matter from me would interfere with the reinvention I crave. At the same time, I feel almost too able to disappear at times.

I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that’s the most dangerous kind of censorship – that’s how hegemony works.

I think playing the glamour card is a disastrous error as a literary writer.

In terms of rock and roll, I’m often drawn to louder, rougher stuff; maybe that’s my history as a punk rock wannabee showing itself! Honestly, though, I’m not one of those people who listens to music constantly. I really love silence.

People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had ‘The Who’ and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the ’80s had other songs and bands. It’s a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally.

Not to brag, but I do think I’ve gotten pretty adept on PowerPoint… except that I can’t figure out how to use Excel!

‘Look at Me’ started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That’s an abstract idea; you don’t think that’s going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.