Jennifer Egan Quotes

It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.

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

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

Writing a novel is a huge adventure; when it's going well it's more fun than fun. When it stutters to a halt put it aside. Go for a swim, go for a walk, take a week off. Don't panic or be afraid; you and your characters are in it together. Trust them to come to your rescue.

A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.

Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.

For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.

Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.

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.'

Ever since I was in my teens I had plans at one point in my life to write a novel.

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

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 wrote four novels under the name Amy Silver. The first one was commissioned, and I was given basically the whole plot and the characters. They told me what to do, and I went straight away and did it. After that, I continued, and I was coming up with more my own ideas, although they did steer me.

I urge aspiring writers to write three full-length novels before contemplating publication.

A lot of people, I think, harbor some kind of ambition to write a novel - they say, 'One day I'm going to write a novel,' and they maybe find the first three pages quite easy, and then they hit a kind of brick wall, and they think that that brick wall means that they're not a writer.

I had always secretly wanted to write a novel.

I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were.

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.