Jennifer Egan Quotes

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

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.

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.

I think 'Dark Blue' came to me while I was doing a project in London. I read it, and the character immediately popped out at me.

A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

I am never not thinking about stories. 'The Bone Season' is 90% of my brain - 10% is interacting with the rest of the world.

I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

What surprised me most while writing 'The Monogram Murders' was that everything I needed seemed to arrive in my head exactly when I needed it.

Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.