some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.
Jennifer EganRead
I guess my comfort zone as a writer is diametrically opposed to my comfort zone as a human being.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the contrast between a writer's creative freedom and personal comfort.
Jennifer Egan emphasizes the dichotomy between her role as a writer, where she ventures into new and challenging ideas and expressions, and her personal life, where she might prefer stability and familiarity. This tension reflects the common struggle many creatives feel, balancing their imagination and desires with everyday existence.
Themes
Comfort ZoneWritingCreativityHuman Behavior
In practice
Example use cases
In a writing workshop, to encourage participants to explore new styles, you might say, 'Remember, as Jennifer Egan suggests, our comfort zones as writers are often different from who we are as individuals.'
More from Jennifer Egan
All quotes βI think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.
Jennifer EganRead
I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.
Jennifer EganRead
I think, for one thing, all of us remember those teenage years and those songs that we fell in love with and the music scene that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we're back in an earlier moment.
Jennifer EganRead
And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
Jennifer EganRead
We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
Jennifer EganRead
Similar quotes
It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.
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If you know what you're looking for, that's all you'll get - what's previously known. But when you're open to what's possible, you get something new - that's creativity.
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If you feel bored or uncomfortable as you're writing, ask yourself what's bothering you and write about that. Sometimes your creative energy is like water in a kinked hose, and before thoughts can flow on the topic at hand, you have to straighten the hose by attending to whatever is preoccupying you.
Natalie GoldbergRead