01c. 1962 ADYou can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
02c. 1962 ADIt made me alert, like someone had scrubbed mint all over my skin. I'd walk into that stinking, miserable prison and for the next three hours, a wise and beautiful woman would float out of the wreckage of my life, and her words and thoughts and tiniest movements were precious.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
03c. 1962 AD...underneath that I'd said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I'm an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
04c. 1962 ADWhen does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
05c. 1962 ADNo one is waiting for me. In this story, I’m the girl no one is waiting for. Usually the girl is fat, but my problem is more rare, which is freckles: I look like someone threw handfuls of mud at my face.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
06c. 1962 ADYou said you were a fairy princessYou said you were a shooting starYou said we'd go to Bora BoraNow look at where the fuck we areJennifer Egan / quote ↗
08c. 1962 ADShe'd risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
09c. 1962 ADA bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
