Quotes from Jennifer Egan

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?

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

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.

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?

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

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?

That we have some history together that hasn't happened yet.

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

You said you were a fairy princess You said you were a shooting star You said we'd go to Bora Bora Now look at where the fuck we are

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

You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha's sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of I'm sorry and I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life , until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face: Fight! Fight! Fight!

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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.

My last novel, 'The Keep,' was very explicitly technological, about the quality of living in a state constantly surrounded by disembodied presences, and I was thinking very much about the online experience.

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 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.

That American confidence is more alive and well than it should be, to this day. But it's such a problem. There's a blindness to that confidence, a presumption that what's good for me is good for you. No! That's what teenagers think: the world revolves around them. As a nation, we've got to stop thinking that way. We're getting too old for that.

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

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.

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.