361 Quotes by Jennifer Egan

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

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.

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

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

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

If having a story that's compelling - you want to know what will happen - is traditional, then ultimately I am a traditionalist. That is what readers care about. It's what I care about as a reader. Now if I can have that along with a strong girding of ideas and some kind of exciting technical forays - then that is just the jackpot.

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

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

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.