Jennifer Egan

“I spend so long writing each of my novels that by the time I'm done with one, I'm ready to discover a totally different world.”

“People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had 'The Who' and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the '80s had other songs and bands. It's a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally.”

“In terms of rock and roll, I'm often drawn to louder, rougher stuff; maybe that's my history as a punk rock wannabee showing itself! Honestly, though, I'm not one of those people who listens to music constantly. I really love silence.”

“Remaining a pop phenomenon for 20 years without dying or lapsing into self-parody is quite a feat.”

“I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called 'A Visit From the Goon Squad,' though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.”

“If you've been around as long as I have, watching the literary scene, then you know that who's in and who's out changes by the year. It's really a very fluid situation that requires that the person who is having the good luck now isn't having it a year or two from now.”

“I felt more doubtful than usual with 'Goon Squad,' because I knew that the book's genre wasn't easily named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.”

“I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.”

“I'm just interested in serialization in fiction. I'm fascinated by it. I love the 19th-century novels. I'm interested in ways to bring that back to fiction.”

“I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.”

“Music makes time fall away like almost nothing else. You hear a song from another moment of your life, and it really is like you're still there.”

“Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.”

“I guess my comfort zone as a writer is diametrically opposed to my comfort zone as a human being.”

“All that love, all that pain, all the stuff people feel – not just me and you, brother, but everyone, everyone who's ever walked this beautiful green planet – how can all that disappear when somebody dies? It can't disappear, it's too big. Too strong, too... permanent. So it moves to another frequency, where the human ear can't pick up.”

“I would go so far as to say that I mostly write terrible things. I mean, my first drafts are so appalling.”

“I try consciously to keep myself entertained and challenged to not repeat myself at all. Like, when I start a new book, my goal is to pretty much throw out what I've done and try something completely different that I think initially I cannot do.”

“I was on a very bumpy plane ride, an overnight flight. I was so miserable, and I pulled out 'David Copperfield,' and I forgot how scared and tired I was, and I thought, 'This is what reading should be.' I'm utterly transported out of my current situation.”

“I grew up in the '70s, when people talked on the phone - and just talked more. I remember the phone was the epicenter of our house. I spent hours every evening as a teenager waiting for the phone to ring and talking to my friends.”

“To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is to hope that your interests in some sense link up with the culture around you.”

“Sometimes I'll watch teenagers and find myself not quite believing I'm older than they are - even wondering, delusionally, if they can see any difference between us.”