Jennifer Egan Quotes

I sometimes don't know what I'm writing when I start writing it, on some level.

When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, 'Oh, I can go with this.' I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.

I feel like you just need to keep writing until the writing itself just begins to take shape.

For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

When I sit down to write, I don't have any real goals except to follow one good sentence with another... I'm not the kind of writer who has a map.

I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

I cannot outline. I do not know what the next thing is going to happen in the book until it comes out of my fingers.

I try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get.

When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.

I try to not be self-conscious in my writing process. I think it's important to just be in your subconscious mind - at least when you're starting an idea.

When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads.

When I'm writing, I'll just say random stuff that doesn't make sense, and then a certain word that I keep saying will stick out, and I'll write from there.

A sense of play is important when I'm writing, and so messing around with, say, a magic routine can feel like play, at least initially.

I write linearly without knowing the full story. I discover it as I write it.

When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both - I never know what's going to happen.

I'm not afraid of just cranking it out and seeing what comes out of my subconscious. Because I don't always know what I'm feeling. I do a lot of rewriting later. But that first blast feels like a spigot - like it's coming from somewhere else.

You want to be able to say anything when you do your first draft, because some of that goofy stuff that you think has nothing to do with it is probably where the mother lode is.

Usually when I'm writing, I kind of know what it is before I start writing and I write stream of consciousness style.

I wrote 'Ava Wrestles the Alligator' when I was 22 or 23. These people and that world have been evolving in me for a while. It's such a shift not to be in that world.

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 was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.