Egan Quotes & Sayings

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

The villainous sun and the starved bank did not seem related - yet. — Timothy Egan

So cotton growers, siphoning from the Ogallala, get three billion dollars a year in taxpayer money for fiber that is shipped to China, where it is used to make cheap clothing sold back to American chain retail stores like Wal-Mart. — Timothy Egan

The art of injudicious reading, the art of miscellaneous reading which every normal man ought to cultivate, is a very fine and satisfactory art; for the best guide to books is a book itself. It clasps hands with a thousand other books. — Maurice Francis Egan

What lists and awards don't measure - and I feel this strongly - is the lasting value of any work of art. They're a snapshot of a moment, and one should always consider their judgments in that context. — Jennifer Egan

Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn't a myth belong to everyone? — Jennifer Egan

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. — Jennifer Egan

The blue, mosquitoey night pushes in from the hotel windows. — Jennifer Egan

It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. — Jennifer Egan

Underneath that I'd said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I'm an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe. — Jennifer Egan

I used to think that if you changed from ... valuing one thing to valuing another, it was because you'd learnt something new, understood something better. And it's not like that at all. I just value what I'm stuck with. That's it, that's the whole story. People make a virtue out of necessity. They sanctify what they can't escape. — Greg Egan

At low tide, much of the sea changes to land, and then more than seven hundred islands can be counted. People come here to hide, to find something they can't find on the mainland, to get religion through solitude. From June till September, nearly every day is perfect, with the 10,778-foot volcano of Mount Baker rising from the tumble of the Cascades to the west, blue herons and bald eagles crowding the skies, killer whales breaching offshore. The water is exceptionally clear, the result of a twice-daily shift-change in tide, when it sweeps north toward the Strait of Georgia, then back south toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In some places, the rip tides create white water like rapids on a foaming river. Being is bliss. But then the winters come and the tourists all go home and clouds hang on the horizon and unemployment doubles and the island dweller is left with whatever it is that led him to escape the rest of the world. — Timothy Egan

Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life. Kate — Greg Egan

Bowie talks in great, voluble torrents, darting from one topic to the next, parenthesizing and then parenthesizing the parentheses, as if he has too many ideas for one conversation. — Sean Egan

The average person might articulate them differently, but we all think about interpersonal relationships in one way or another. Writers just express that in different ways and capture it in different ways. 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. — Jennifer Egan

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. — Jennifer Egan

I've done a road trip across Italy with a girlfriend, and that was very romantic. I think that road trips are probably one of the romantic things you can do. To take your girlfriend and just stay wherever; don't have a destination and just drive and see where the road takes you is pretty cool. — Christopher Egan

From the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard came a note from Professor F. W. Putnam, rapturous in his commendation of "your great work. — Timothy Egan

In court, pricey lawyers from the city try to answer the question: whose life is more endangered, the spotted owl's or the logger's? Victims of mutual incompatibility, both owl and logger are disappearing in Oregon, a state that once had enough standing timber to rebuild every house in America. — Timothy Egan

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. — Jennifer Egan

Though a degree from Yale was not required, Pinchot wanted his foresters to be able to write well, for the numerous reports that their enemies in Congress would be second-guessing. — Timothy Egan

I was recruited by the dead,' Zak said. 'Not in any rush to join them in their silence, but from the urgent need to understand what they might have thought and done that could survive them, that could speak across the ages, that could be continued even now. — Greg Egan

Proust, my big inspiration for 'Goon Squad,' uses music a lot in his novel, both in terms of plot and structure. I liked the idea of doing the same thing, which is one reason I structured 'Goon Squad' as a record album, with an A side and a B side, that's built around the contrasting sounds of the individual numbers in it. — Jennifer Egan

All I'm saying is, technology can potentially do better than nature because of the very fact that it's not always a matter of life or death. If an organism has been fine-tuned to maximize its overall reproductive success, that's not the same thing as embodying the ideal solution to every individual problem it faces. Evolution appears inventive to us because it's had time to try so many possibilities, but it has no margin at all for real risks, let alone anything truly whimsical. We can celebrate our own beautiful mistakes. All evolution can do is murder them. — Greg Egan

Is a stranger in a crowd less than human, just because you can't witness her inner life? — Greg Egan

But a story was invisible, infinite, it had no size or shape. Information. It could fill the world or fit inside a fingernail. — Jennifer Egan

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. — Jennifer Egan

Noreen didn't speak, and as the minutes passed she seemed to fade into the rummaging breeze and chatter of insects, as if the night itself were alive. — Jennifer Egan

With an earnestness that would be laughable in a person who wasn't from Wisconsin. — Jennifer Egan

I'm very interested in the way the Internet has changed teenage life. Obviously it's very different from when I grew up, when there weren't even answering machines, much less computers. I was telling my children this the other day, and the little one said, "Did you have electricity, Mom?" and I was like okay, enough, kid. — Jennifer Egan

Dear Earth-dweller: Please use your BRAIN! As anyone KNOWS in this SCIENTIFIC age, the origin of the races is now WELL UNDERSTOOD! Africans traveled here after the DELUGE from Mercury, Asians from Venus, Caucasians from Mars, and the people of the Pacific islands from assorted asteroids. If you don't have the NECESSARY OCCULT SKILLS to project rays from the continents to the ASTRAL PLANE to verify this, a simple analysis of TEMPERAMENT and APPEARANCE should make this obvious even to YOU! But please don't put WORDS into MY mouth! Just because we're all from different PLANETS doesn't mean we can't still be FRIENDS. — Greg Egan

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words
"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"
words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way? — Jennifer Egan

And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.
We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature,
art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass on
the hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent. — Greg Egan

Any man that hits a woman is not a real man, he's a coward. With my wife Jodi, I think it's my job to protect her and stop anything bad happening in her life. Abusing your partner is the opposite of that. I want her to wake up and feel safe. — Kian Egan

Howie's troubles were a favorite family topic, and behind the shaking heads and oh it's so sads you could hear the joy pushing right up through because doesn't every family like having one person who's fucked up so fantastically that everyone else feels like a model citizen next to him? — Jennifer Egan

I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published. — Greg Egan

Those voices telling you that it's all wrong, and you should be louder or softer or more fashionable or marketable? Those are the bad voices. The only guide you can afford to listen to is the obsessive, lovestruck thing inside you that keeps insisting it finds some particular subject utterly fascinating. Do not shame this part of yourself. Take it by the hand and lead it to safety. — Doris Egan

Most people don't think of Los Angeles as a theatre town, and that you have to go to New York to be in theatre, and it's really not true. — Susan Egan

You know my position. We need to come back in force and deal with this sickness once and for all: occupy the city, impose our own laws, harvest every noxious plant and burn it. It — Greg Egan

I turn to contemporary fiction seeking a shared awareness with the writer of the cultural moment we both occupy, its peculiar challenges. — Jennifer Egan

It wasn't depression, exactly; more a weird, restless pressure that made me wander the house late at night, opening the best bottles of wine in our cellar and drinking them alone while I channel-surfed along the forgotten byways of cable TV. — Jennifer Egan

Last year, [Pope Francis] was asked about his secret to happiness. He said slow down. Take time off. Live and let live. Don't proselytize. Work for peace. Work at a job that offers basic human dignity. Don't hold on to negative feelings. Move calmly through life. Enjoy art, books and playfulness. — Timothy Egan

Berkeley was the Capital of the Hand Dryers? I felt bad enough being locked out of the National Parks and Forests because of the Federal Shutdown, so the chance to salvage something uniquely interesting and culturally important as the hand dryer factory slipped by me. Not one sign on any exit ramp. — Patrick Egan

A New Campus: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Ann Bowers. Steve Jobs, appearance before the Cupertino City Council, June 7, 2011. CHAPTER 41: ROUND THREE Family Ties: Interviews with Laurene Powell, Erin Jobs, Steve Jobs, Kathryn Smith, Jennifer Egan. Email from Steve Jobs, June 8, 2010, 4:55 p.m.; Tina Redse to Steve Jobs, July 20, 2010, and Feb. 6, 2011. President Obama: Interviews with David Axelrod, Steve Jobs, John Doerr, Laurene Powell, Valerie Jarrett, Eric Schmidt, Austan Goolsbee. Third Medical Leave, 2011: Interviews with Kathryn Smith, Steve Jobs, Larry Brilliant. Visitors: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mike Slade. CHAPTER 42: LEGACY Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It (Yale, 2008), 2; Cory Doctorow, Why I Won't Buy an iPad, — Walter Isaacson

I think people are surprised to learn that I'm pretty goofy and pretty funny. — Susan Egan

I'm not a wildly gifted person; I don't play an instrument or speak another language or have great accomplishments in another field, as many writers do. But writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes I feel that I have access to more ideas and information than my conscious mind could think up. — Jennifer Egan

Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you. — Jennifer Egan

Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work. — Jennifer Egan

This is what happens when an outlaw kidnaps a scholar of myths and legends. — Doris Egan

We all got into it, cracking walnut shells with our shoes, pulling the sweet white meat from inside while a crowd of our Chinese hosts eyed us with bemused perplexity. "Americans," I imagined them saying, afterward. "The poor sons of bitches have everything in the world, but they've never tasted fresh walnuts. — Jennifer Egan

She wanted the city to be full of exclusive places turning people away, as long as they always accommodated her. It didn't work like that. What a stupid place to live - stretched thin, overbooked, sold out in advance. — Jennifer Egan

We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it. — Jennifer Egan

NICOLE CULLEN Long Tom Lookout — Jennifer Egan

There are things you're just positive will happen to you. Then there's that second when you realize, Jesus Christ. Maybe they won't. — Jennifer Egan

I love your hair. It's like a waterfall of black ink," he utters softly. — Petra F. Bagnardi

the Forest Service has punched 343,000 miles of logging roads into the vast stands of public trees - more than seven times the 44,000 miles of road built by the national highway system. — Timothy Egan

...our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood. — Jennifer Egan

They floated for a while, two flesher-shaped creatures and a giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars. — Greg Egan

I just want to keep doing things completely different from the other. I just want to keep working with great people, great filmmakers and great actors and just building on that experience. — Christopher Egan

No one grows up. That's one of the sickest lies they ever tell you. People change. People compromise. People get stranded in situations they don't want to be in ... and they make the best of it. But don't try to tell me it's some kind of ... glorious preordained ascent into emotional maturity. It's not. — Greg Egan

It's a wonderful body, he'd whispered the next morning while she was still asleep. Not even the blue silk Loretta Caponi pajamas he'd brought back for her from Florence could disguise its lumpiness. But it was so gorgeously strong. She almost never got sick. She could outswim riptides and ski double diamonds. And even when a wave scraped her into the sand or a patch of ice threw her to the ground, she rarely bruised. He loved that body for taking care of her, for sheltering the one thing he couldn't live without. — Tanya Egan Gibson

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm. — Jennifer Egan

Even the most secure houses achieve, in deep night, a state of relative unconsciousness. — Jennifer Egan

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

In a way, I'm always trying to do something I'm not qualified to do. 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. — Jennifer Egan

And it was only as he rose from the bed, his body illuminated by the colored lights of the city, that I caught the glint of calculation behind his eyes, a cold, blank set to his face. His shadow self, and not a nice one. — Jennifer Egan

In the case of 'Goon Squad,' which sold slowly for a long time despite the good reviews, those 'best of 2010' lists were pivotal, and made the book really sell. — Jennifer Egan

To be a devout reader was to be an acolyte of solace. — Tanya Egan Gibson

Today I share about my addiction and recovery journey as often as possible because I don't want to die all alone in a dark closet, shrouded in shame beside the decomposing skeletons I tried so desperately to hide. I want to live. — Shannon Egan

if thr r childrn thr mst be a fUtr rt? — Jennifer Egan

Naturalist Roger Tory Peterson has calculated that the Olympic Rain Forest is weighted down with more living matter than any other place on earth. — Timothy Egan

When you get to pass between the mountains, leave your rucksack behind. You won't need the compass anymore. — Patrick Egan

Nicky Egan has the finesse of Bonnie Raitt merged with the primal force of Janis Joplin. It is a rare combination. Her passion is a joy to behold - and her talent is undeniable. She belongs in any conversation about great contemporary female soul singers. If you're up for a revelatory evening, then put her high on your list. — Steve Morse

I love playing the piano. I have one in my apartment, and I learnt by ear. I sing a lot of Coldplay, but do my own stuff too. — Christopher Egan

You can only write regularly if you're willing to write badly. You can't write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well. — Jennifer Egan

Much of Texas took its prohibition seriously. Not Dalhart. It took its whiskey seriously, in part because some of the finest corn liquor in America was coming out of the High Plains. — Timothy Egan

When I use people I know, all of my instincts seem to go dead, and if I'm getting anywhere near myself then I can't do it. It's actually a real weakness! I hate writing personal essays, I don't think I'm especially good at it. I like just encountering [my characters], discovering them. I love the escape of just being surrounded by all these people who are nothing like people I know. But I don't find it hard to be in the middle of a different life, with a different set of habits and way of thinking and talking. That seems to come easily to me. — Jennifer Egan

I've had nannies and au pairs. I have tutors and a trainer and a shrink. I know paid-nice. It comes with gritted teeth. — Tanya Egan Gibson

The Universe may be stranger than we can imagine, but it's going to have a tough time outdoing Egan. — Greg Egan

I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful; people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't. — Anne Enright

Art that's blind to the true landscape we inhabit - physical reality in the widest sense - is just absurdly, pathetically blinkered and myopic.
So while I'm sure that the individual works I've written have only succeeded to varying degrees, I'm still proud to have done something to nudge the center of gravity of contemporary SF some microscopic distance towards a genuine engagement with reality." -Greg Egan — Karen Burnham

Mary Baker Eddy: "Home is the dearest spot on earth, and should be the centre, not the boundary, of the affections. — Elisabeth Egan

No one objects to the notion that every technological civilisation might undergo its own Introdus. — Greg Egan

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed. — Greg Egan

Setting, Miss Weiss, is nobody's slut. — Tanya Egan Gibson

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

Reach isn't describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: it's simultaneous. — Jennifer Egan

When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I was really interested in gore. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon and he had a lot of books in his library that I would just pore over. A lot of them had really horrible pictures of deformities. — Jennifer Egan

Danny had no idea what the thing was. All he knew was that he lived more or less in a constant state of expecting something any day, any hour, that would change everything, knock the world upside down and put Danny's whole life into perspective as a story of complete success, because every twist and turn and snag and fuckup would always have been leading up to this. Unexpected stuff could hit him like the thing at first: a girl he'd forgotten giving his number to suddenly calling up out of the blue, a friend with some genius plan for making money, better yet a person he'd never heard of who wanted to talk. Danny got an actual physical head rush from messages like these, but as soon as he called back and found out the details, the calls would turn out to just be about more projects, possibilities, schemes that boiled down to everything staying exactly like it was. — Jennifer Egan

I crossed my arms, stilled by a revelation that had been mounting in me ever since our arrival in this bower of poured concrete: that as the "subject," I was both the center of attention and completely extraneous. The feeling brought with it an eerie, stultifying familiarity; I was still the model, after all. I was modeling my life. — Jennifer Egan

You need messiness and magic, serendipity and insanity. Creativity comes from time off, and time out. — Timothy Egan

We're the survivors. Not everyone is. But we are. — Jennifer Egan

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? — Jennifer Egan

She looks up. I've caught her by surprise. Her face opens up and all of a sudden it's like that paper mask is transparent. I'm looking right through it, and I get a flash of some kind of life we could've had - barbecues, dogs, kids flopping over us in bed - it rolls through me fast but strong and clear, like one of those cooking smells that blows in the window so sharp you can pick out the ingredients. And then it's gone. It's gone, and Holly's holding my hand. Finally, after that long long wait, her hand is back on mine. Dry cool fingers, slim. The rings loose. I close my eyes. My hand is so hot, I feel my pulse in every finger. I'm afraid she'll let go but she doesn't let go. She keeps her hand around mine and it's like she's holding all of me in her cool sweetness, calming my fever back down. — Jennifer Egan

I love to put on a wig, a costume, inhabit a different world and be called something different. — Susan Egan

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

I'm sorry and I believe in you and I'll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life. — Jennifer Egan

But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys. — Jennifer Egan

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

After my parents died, it took me months before I could carry on a conversation with someone who had not known them, who expected me to be young and sparkling and untouched by grief. — Jennifer Egan