Jennifer Egan Quotes

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars.

I'm excited and terrified to write something new. I won't be writing about suburbia.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

It takes a lot of adrenaline and fear to make me actually write.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

I'm such a coward that unless I get a good writer, I don't want to make a picture.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.

To write fiction is to think that you're doing it wrong - that your work habits are inhibiting you; that you've chosen the wrong subject; that you've chosen the right subject, but that someone else has, unbeknownst to you, already written exactly the book you're laboring over.

Writing is just always hard for me. It always feels like drawing blood. It's never particularly easy.

Once I have a book in my head, I write progressive drafts fast and obsessively and have trouble sleeping.

Until a book starts forming in your head, you always wonder, 'Am I going to be able to do this again?'

Try writing a book, dude. That's difficult.

I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.

People think writing a children's book is something you could do in an afternoon but it's actually really hard.

Getting to the point where I was ready to write a book has been about a 20-year journey of being, really honestly, too afraid to try - which I think is pretty common for people who are trying to write a large piece of fiction.

I have to always remember, writing is really hard.

I find writing really difficult - definitely the most difficult of all the things I do.

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible; it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

No matter how many awards you've won or how many sales you've got, come the next book it's still a blank sheet of paper and you're still panicking like hell that you've got nothing new to say.

I think that most writers who wait until they're inspired to write are just waiting for the fear to subside.

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

The screenwriters I know share a few personality traits and one of them is anxiety.

When I was 19 years old, I wrote my first book. I took a computer science class, and the book was garbage. I thought I could write a better one, so I did.