110+ Jennifer Egan Quotes On Writing, Identity And Being

Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her other works include The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, and Manhattan Beach. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jennifer Egan on life, writing, identity.

Top 10 Jennifer Egan Quotes

1. 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.
2. If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.
3. Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.
4. I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.
5. 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.
6. Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.
7. I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.
8. Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.
9. 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.
10. I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.

Jennifer Egan Short Quotes

• That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.
• I'm a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.
• Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.
• It's finished. Everything went past, without me.
• Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.
• if thr r childrn thr mst be a fUtr rt?
• She looks like someone I want to know, or maybe even be.
• It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.
• They were snobs or idiots or both...yet she was inexplicably crushed by their coldness.
• No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.

Jennifer Egan Quotes About Life

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. — Jennifer Egan

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

The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. — Jennifer Egan

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

What I Suddenly Understand My job is to make people uncomfortable. + I will do it all my life. ---> My mother, Sasha Blake, is my first victim. — Jennifer Egan

Sometimes I imagine myself looking back on right now and I think like where will I be standing when I look back Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or... or what — Jennifer Egan

I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real? — Jennifer Egan

Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them. — Jennifer Egan

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

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

Jennifer Egan Quotes About Writing

I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that. — Jennifer Egan

We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well. — Jennifer Egan

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. — Jennifer Egan

Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do. — Jennifer Egan

Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff...forms a base on which to build something better. — Jennifer Egan

One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling. — Jennifer Egan

A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work. — Jennifer Egan

We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it. — Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan Quotes About Love

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. — Jennifer Egan

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. — Jennifer Egan

I guess it's always romantic when two people fall in love.... Even if it turns out not to be real. — Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

Stu walked Bennie over to Chris in the chair and parted his hair to reveal some tan little creatures the size of poppy seeds moving around on his scalp. Bennie felt himself grow faint.'Lice' the barber whispered.'They get it at school'. 'But he goes to private school' Bernie had blurted.'In Crandale,New York! — Jennifer Egan

I'm very interested in the way the Internet has changed teenage life. Obviously it's very different from when I grew up, when there weren't even answering machines, much less computers. I was telling my children this the other day, and the little one said, "Did you have electricity, Mom?" and I was like okay, enough, kid. — Jennifer Egan

The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them—listen to me. And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen. — Jennifer Egan

I picture it like Judgement Day,' he says finally, his eyes on the water. 'We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost. — Jennifer Egan

happened as I listened: I felt pain. Not in my head, not in my arm, not in my leg; everywhere at once. I told myself there was no difference between being “inside” and being “outside,” that it all came down to X’s and O’s that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I limped away. — Jennifer Egan

He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints. — Jennifer Egan

The sky was electric blue above the trees but the yard felt dark. Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat her forehead on her knees. The grass and soil were still warm from the day. She wanted to cry but she couldn't. The feeling was too deep. — Jennifer Egan

The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material. — Jennifer Egan

Oh we'll know each other forever, Bix says. The days of losing touch are almost gone. — Jennifer Egan

If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing. — Jennifer Egan

Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. the hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We're sick of them. — Jennifer Egan

"See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. 'It's mine." — Jennifer Egan

There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing. — Jennifer Egan

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. — Jennifer Egan

I grew up in the 70s, when people talked on the phone - and just talked more. I remember the phone was the epicenter of our house. I spent hours every evening as a teenager waiting for the phone to ring and talking to my friends. Before the age of technology, it was also easier to just disappear from the face of the earth. — Jennifer Egan

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

...water laughing softly down a black stone wall. — Jennifer Egan

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

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

I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget. — Jennifer Egan

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

I’m like America ” he said. Stephanie swung around to look at him unnerved. “What are you talking about ” she said. “Are you off your meds ” “Our hands are dirty ” Jules said. — Jennifer Egan

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

Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone? — Jennifer Egan

Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn't a myth belong to everyone? — Jennifer Egan

There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable. — Jennifer Egan

When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened? — Jennifer Egan

I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question. — Jennifer Egan

Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet. — Jennifer Egan

Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you. — Jennifer Egan

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

Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase "meant to be"--usually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people. — Jennifer Egan

He remembered his mentor, Lou Kline, telling him in the nineties that rock and roll had peaked at Monterey Pop. They'd been in Lou's house in LA with its waterfalls, the pretty girls Lou always had, his car collection out front, and Bennie had looked into his idol's famous face and thought, You're finished. Nostalgia was the end - everyone knew that. — Jennifer Egan

It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads? — Jennifer Egan

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

Real computers scared me; if you can find Them, then They can find you. — Jennifer Egan

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

So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset. — Jennifer Egan

[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering. — Jennifer Egan

Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection. — Jennifer Egan

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. — Jennifer Egan

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

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

And the question is, which one is really "you. — Jennifer Egan

There's a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours - days, if I have to. — Jennifer Egan

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

This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words. — Jennifer Egan

The answers were maddeningly absent—it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back. — Jennifer Egan

Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins. — Jennifer Egan

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

They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. "I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. "You grew up, Alex," he said, "just like the rest of us. — Jennifer Egan

I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I’m guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn’t there. — Jennifer Egan

And for an instant he would remember Naples: sitting with Sasha in her tiny room; the jolt of surprise and delight he'd felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured inside her circle of wire. Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame with orange light. "See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine. — Jennifer Egan

But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys. — Jennifer Egan

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. — Jennifer Egan

I think, The world is actually huge. That's the part no one can really explain. — Jennifer Egan

And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished. — Jennifer Egan

th blu nyt th stRs u can't c th hum tht nevr gOs awy — Jennifer Egan

I think the one thing that's changed over time is that I've come to realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don't think it will work out, doesn't mean that it actually won't. — Jennifer Egan

some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me. — Jennifer Egan

I know I'm famous and irresitible - a combination whose properties closely resemble radioactivity - and I know that you in this room are helpless against me. — Jennifer Egan

The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn't really over, so you're relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL. — Jennifer Egan

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

Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can. — Jennifer Egan

I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn’t have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. It seems writer’s block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen. — Jennifer Egan

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

Being somewhere but not completely: that was home for Danny. . . . All he needed was a cellphone or I-access, or both at once, or even just a plan to leave wherever he was and go someplace else really really soon. — Jennifer Egan

Life Lessons by Jennifer Egan

1. From the work of Jennifer Egan, we can learn the importance of taking risks in order to create something unique and innovative.
2. We can also learn the value of exploring different genres and styles of writing, as Egan often blends elements of traditional and experimental fiction.
3. Lastly, we can learn the power of using vivid imagery and symbolism to create a strong emotional connection with the reader.