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
It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Creative work often involves trial and error, and the best ideas can emerge spontaneously.
In this quote, Jennifer Egan emphasizes the unpredictable nature of creativity, acknowledging that while much of her writing may not meet her standards, the moments of inspiration that feel enjoyable and original often arise without overthinking. This highlights the importance of embracing the imperfect process of creation and the serendipitous nature of artistic expression.
Themes
CreativityWritingInspirationArtProcess
In practice
Example use cases
During a workshop on creative writing, I could use this quote to illustrate the importance of allowing yourself to write freely.
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.
Jennifer EganRead
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