361 Quotes by Jennifer Egan

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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