Jennifer Egan

“My last novel, 'The Keep,' was very explicitly technological, about the quality of living in a state constantly surrounded by disembodied presences, and I was thinking very much about the online experience.”

“The part of the process that's exciting to me is feeling like I'm in a place I've never been before, in every way. Without that, I don't know if I'd be a writer.”

“I love how close New York is to Europe; I love the seasons, and I don't think I could live without them. They're the way I track the passage of time.”

“That adage about 'Write what you know' is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I'm curious to find out.”

“It's the feeling of being lifted out of my life into another world that is the thrill of writing fiction.”

“Nowadays I'm more interested in what you'd call 'alternative.' Lately we've been listening to a lot of Mumford & Sons, and Jenny Owen Youngs. I'm also pretty crazy about the Kings of Convenience, a Norwegian band that's been compared to Simon and Garfunkel.”

“If I'm doing something I know I can pull off, then that's not the book I should be writing.”

“I grew up in the 1970s, and my friends and I felt very keenly that we had missed the '60s. We were bummed out about it.”

“I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.”

“It seemed impossible that a scrappy book like 'Goon Squad' could win an award like that. It's such an iconic honor. I think what the Pulitzer means to me is that I'll need to work very, very hard to try to live up to it.”

“I'm not sure if the passage of time affects our core identities so much as reveals them to us.”

“It's our job as fiction writers to provide a delight that nothing else can - to such a degree that people have no choice but to read our work. Now that's a very tall order, if not impossible. But why not try?”

“In a way, I'm always trying to do something I'm not qualified to do. So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset.”

“I have a tendency to coddle my sons because I want to keep them safe, but I also want them to be strong and independent and curious and bold, and I worry that my coddling is going to have exactly the opposite effect.”

“I learned you have to move fast, writing futuristic satire in America: Before you know it, you're a realist!”

“Fiction is my deepest love, but I love journalism, too. It keeps me thinking vigorously, and it reminds me that there is a world out there.”

“When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I was really interested in gore. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon and he had a lot of books in his library that I would just pore over. A lot of them had really horrible pictures of deformities.”

“When I think about a book like 'A Clockwork Orange,' which I really loved, the weird hybrid language is what I remember most.”

“I'm not a wildly gifted person; I don't play an instrument or speak another language or have great accomplishments in another field, as many writers do. But writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes I feel that I have access to more ideas and information than my conscious mind could think up.”

“Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet.”