Jennifer Egan Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.

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

Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.

Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.

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

It's finished. Everything went past, without me.

She looks like someone I want to know, or maybe even be.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

...water laughing softly down a black stone wall.