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've tried writing on a computer thinking it would make me more efficient, but if you're writing crummy stuff, being efficient is no help.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Efficiency in writing is irrelevant if the content is not of high quality.
Jennifer Egan emphasizes that the tools we use for writing, like computers, do not guarantee good writing. If the ideas and execution are not strong, then simply being efficient in producing text does not lead to meaningful outcomes. The quality of what we produce is far more important than how quickly we can produce it.
Themes
WritingEfficiencyQualityContentCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
Quoting Egan during a writing workshop to highlight the importance of quality over speed.
More from Jennifer Egan
All quotes →I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.
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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.
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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.
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And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
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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.
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Similar quotes
Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.
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All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.
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You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
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I do not like to write - I like to have written.
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The most important thing in writing is to have written. I can always fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank one.
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