Quotes About Jennifer Egan

I teach intermittently, and while I enjoy it, I don't find that it's a calling for me.

I write to escape from my life. Writing about men separates 'me' from my work in a way that I find comforting.

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

But 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.

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!

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

I think playing the glamour card is a disastrous error as a literary writer.

I was not a punk rocker, absolutely not, but I certainly knew quite a lot of them, and I definitely went to the Mab - it was raw, interesting intense scene, so I was very drawn to it, but I was a total outsider.

Remaining a pop phenomenon for 20 years without dying or lapsing into self-parody is quite a feat.

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.

In a way, I started 'Goon Squad' not even realizing I was writing a book. I thought I was just writing a few stories to stall before starting this other book that I wanted to write - or thought I wanted to write: I still haven't written it.

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.

I don't really begin with ideas about genre. I certainly wrote a gothic novel, 'The Keep,' that conformed to and, in some ways, played with every convention I knew of to work with in the gothic, but the way I came to it was very instinctive and visceral.