“You can research until you're falling asleep, but that still doesn't m...” — Jennifer Egan Quote

“You can research until you're falling asleep, but that still doesn't mean you're really fluent in the material.”

“What lists and awards don't measure - and I feel this strongly - is the lasting value of any work of art. They're a snapshot of a moment, and one should always consider their judgments in that context.”

“I don't really begin with ideas about genre. I certainly wrote a gothic novel, 'The Keep,' that conformed to and, in some ways, played with every convention I knew of to work with in the gothic, but the way I came to it was very instinctive and visceral.”

“When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.”

“My mom used to say that if someone woke her up in the middle of the night and asked how old she was, she'd answer 27. Hearing her, I'd think, 'That's ridiculous; your job as my mom is to be old.'”

“I'm a nocturnal creature, so my experiential canvas comes to life when the rest of the world is asleep.”

“Attempt easy tasks as if they were difficult, and difficult as if they were easy; in the one case that confidence may not fall asleep, in the other that it may not be dismayed.”

“I easily fall asleep during a movie.”

“I like shopping from the comfort of my bed whilst my husband is asleep beside me.”

“If I'm excited about it, I'm pretty sure an audience is going to enjoy it. If I'm bored with an idea, you can bet they're going to be asleep. So I try to only do things that I'm fairly excited about.”

“If you said to me, 'Lie down on that concrete floor and fall asleep,' I could do it. I can sleep anywhere at any time of day on any surface.”