Jennifer Egan Quotes

I like reading a lot. Jeffrey Archer and Robert Ludlum are my favourite authors. I love making realistic cinema, so I read non-fiction more.

English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

I love the idea of real-life experiences finding their way into fiction. I think that's really cool.

What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.

First and foremost, I consider myself a storyteller. And I'm endlessly fascinated with people, with what they do and why... and how they feel about it. Which means I'm interested in romance fiction. I was drawn to it, as both a reader and a writer, at the very beginning of my career. It's my kind of storytelling.

I love fiction and read novels constantly.

I would love to focus on writing books that were not just about issues.

I think all good short stories are about what it means to tell a good story.

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

There's a lot for screenwriters to steal from songwriters, in terms of getting to the point.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.

It's funny, because I don't think of myself as a novelist. I think of myself as a writer.

I love that there's a beginning, middle and end to a film and you can craft what the whole journey is going to look like.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

I'm big on story structure. I studied with John Truby, who mapped out story by means of moral wants and needs, and that's what I do. Hey, so does John Irving.