Jennifer Egan quotes:

I was obsessed with The Who. I would have accepted a marriage proposal from Roger Daltrey on the spot. I went to all of their shows in San Francisco and some in L.A. That was as close as I got to being a groupie.

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.

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.

I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments.

I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. 'Goon Squad' provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out 'The Who,' which was my absolute favorite band.

The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material.

Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. the hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We're sick of them.

She was clean": no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?

The music industry is an interesting lens through which to look at change, because it has had such a difficult time adjusting to the digital age.

Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

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.

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.

I loved every minute of my childhood - sunbathing on the fire escape, digging for buried treasure in the back yard, pulling alewives out of the sand... Then it was all taken away from me. I came back every summer to visit my father until I was 18, but I was always the outsider.

If you read novels of the 19th century, they're pretty experimental. They take lots of chances; they seem to break a lot of rules. You've got omniscient narrators lecturing at times to the reader in first person. If you go back to the earliest novels, this is happening to a wild extent, like 'Tristram Shandy' or 'Don Quixote'.

Das mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, 'Mine pot! Mine pot!

He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints."

He gestured at the girl I'd been dealing with, whose carefree smile could be roughly translated as: 'He's officially not my problem anymore.' I gave her a wink whose exact translation was: 'Don't be so sure, darling."

I had this idea that I could hire myself out as a person to go on archeological digs and dig, without any training! I actually wrote to a number of archeology departments and offered up my services.

Look at Me' started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That's an abstract idea; you don't think that's going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.

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.

Technology makes everyone feel old. A laptop is old after two years. Someone always has something newer. Everyone seems to feel obsolete now, even the young.

I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.

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 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.

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.

I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.

I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.

a swell of gratitude and appreciation for his assistant, as opposed to the murderous rage he felt toward the rest of his staff

One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling.

Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.

If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.

Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.

The average person might articulate them differently, but we all think about interpersonal relationships in one way or another. Writers just express that in different ways and capture it in different ways. 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.

I picture it like Judgement Day,' he says finally, his eyes on the water. 'We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.

I did go on safari in Kenya when I was 17, with my mother, stepfather and little brother, and I kept a careful journal of the experience that was very helpful in terms of my sensory impressions of Africa. I have traveled quite a bit at distinct times in my life, though now that I have kids I've settled down.

Sometimes I imagine myself looking back on right now and I think like where will I be standing when I look back Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or... or what

Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.

The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn't really over, so you're relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.

When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?

Because you can't write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That's how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.

Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn't stemmed the suspicion that people's opinions weren't really their own. "Who's paying you?" was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter - who would let themselves be bought?

Behind the desk was nothing but view-the whole city flung out in front of us the way street vendors fling out their towels packed with cheap, glittery watches and belts. That's how New York looked: like gorgeous, easy thing to have, even for me.

Thousands of solar panels lift and tilt at the same time, in the same way. I clutch at Dad's arm: Why are they doing that? They're collecting moonlight, Dad says, and I remember: it's weaker, but we use it.

The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.

We're the survivors. Not everyone is. But we are.

She was clean": no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses~?

This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.

You 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 are

Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn't a myth belong to everyone?

And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.

I was a stepchild in two different families. The hardest thing about being a stepchild is you know that in some way everything would be easier if you didnt exist.

I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?

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.

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 very interested in the way the Internet has changed teenage life. Obviously it's very different from when I grew up, when there weren't even answering machines, much less computers. I was telling my children this the other day, and the little one said, "Did you have electricity, Mom?" and I was like okay, enough, kid.

In the case of 'Goon Squad,' which sold slowly for a long time despite the good reviews, those 'best of 2010' lists were pivotal, and made the book really sell.

I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.

We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it.

I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, 'I'm going to ace this.' It's just not who I am.

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.

I write totally spontaneously. I actually write fiction by hand - that always seems to startle people. I think the reason I do that is to bypass the thinking part of me and get to the more unconscious part, which is where all the good ideas seem to be.

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.

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.

Proust, my big inspiration for 'Goon Squad,' uses music a lot in his novel, both in terms of plot and structure. I liked the idea of doing the same thing, which is one reason I structured 'Goon Squad' as a record album, with an A side and a B side, that's built around the contrasting sounds of the individual numbers in it.

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.

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.

I'm a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.

The book that is the closest genetically to 'Goon Squad' is 'Look at Me.' It has the futuristic element - although, freakishly, almost every aspect I invented has come to pass in some way, including the terrorist who fantasies about blowing up the World Trade Centre. That was extremely uncomfortable. The book came out on the week of 9/11.

I was a stepchild in two different families. The hardest thing about being a stepchild is you know that in some way everything would be easier if you didn't exist.

If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.

Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.

I don't want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.

The answers were maddeningly absent"?it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back.

Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.

A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work.

Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,

There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.

I write fiction longhand. That's not so much about rejecting technology as being unable to write fiction on a computer for some reason. I don't think I would write it on a typewriter either. I write in a very blind gut instinctive way. It just doesn't feel right. There's a physical connection. And then in nonfiction that's not the case at all. I can't even imagine writing nonfiction by hand.

I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. It seems writer's block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen.

I guess in my own life, privacy, anonymity, and the mystery of being lost are important. I also feel that people are mysterious and complex no matter what they do, and no matter how hard they try to reveal their own mystery.

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

I write my first draft by hand, at least for fiction. For non-fiction, I write happily on a computer, but for fiction I write by hand, because I'm trying to achieve a kind of thoughtless state, or an unconscious instinctive state. 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.

Time's a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?" Scotty shook his head. "The goon won.

I think, The world is actually huge. That's the part no one can really explain.

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn't expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.

...water laughing softly down a black stone wall.

I'm like America " he said. Stephanie swung around to look at him unnerved. "What are you talking about " she said. "Are you off your meds " "Our hands are dirty " Jules said.

Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.

At night, the house thick with sleep, she would peer out her bedroom window at the trees and sky and feel the presence of a mystery. Some possibility that included her--separate from her present life and without its limitations. A secret. Riding in the car with her father, she would look out at other cars full of people she'd never seen, any one of whom she might someday meet and love, and would feel the world holding her making its secret plans.

The sky was electric blue above the trees but the yard felt dark. Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat her forehead on her knees. The grass and soil were still warm from the day. She wanted to cry but she couldn't. The feeling was too deep.

if thr r childrn thr mst be a fUtr rt?

We're [writers] all afraid of writing badly, and there are psychological reasons, like the bad interior of ourselves is somehow being revealed, but we all fear that, and you can't write well if you're not willing to write badly. That's why you have to make writing a habit, so it feels normal and not strange.

...real computers scared me; if you can find Them, then They can find you...

Music and time have such an interesting relationship. 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. That's why the music of our youth ends up being particularly powerful. The coming of age music that you grab a hold of as the symbol or the expression of your independence and hopes for the future and anger and rebellion or whatever it is you're feeling is so powerful for the rest of your life when you hear it.

The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.

What I Suddenly Understand My job is to make people uncomfortable. + I will do it all my life. ---> My mother, Sasha Blake, is my first victim.

They were snobs or idiots or both...yet she was inexplicably crushed by their coldness.

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've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, I'm going to ace this. It's just not who I am.

No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.

I'm sorry and I believe in you and I'll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life.

It's finished. Everything went past, without me.

Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.

She'd risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.

And for an instant he would remember Naples: sitting with Sasha in her tiny room; the jolt of surprise and delight he'd felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured inside her circle of wire. Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame with orange light. "See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine.

She looks like someone I want to know, or maybe even be.

Oh we'll know each other forever, Bix says. The days of losing touch are almost gone.

There's a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours - days, if I have to.

'Look at Me' started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That's an abstract idea; you don't think that's going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.

th blu nyt th stRs u can't c th hum tht nevr gOs awy

See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine.

Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.

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.

Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?

It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

happened as I listened: I felt pain. Not in my head, not in my arm, not in my leg; everywhere at once. I told myself there was no difference between being "inside" and being "outside," that it all came down to X's and O's that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I limped away.

I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.