I'm not a technophobe, but I'm pretty old fashioned.
— Jennifer Egan
You can research until you're falling asleep, but that still doesn't mean you're really fluent in the material.
I've tried writing on a computer thinking it would make me more efficient, but if you're writing crummy stuff, being efficient is no help.
I just think that, for my particular personality, feeling slightly invisible is always a help.
I felt unbelievably lucky to have the success I did with 'Goon Squad,' and I also felt the pressure of how fleeting that success can be.
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.
I have a hatred of familiarity. If I feel like I am doing something I've done before, it feels old and done. I feel I have no choice but to strike out in directions that feel new - anything less just doesn't seem worth it.
I write with pen and paper, my first draft, on legal pads.
I've been interested in terrorism from the very beginning. My first novel is about that, too, and I think one reason I've been so interested in terrorism is because I have a deep interest - one of my deepest interests - in image culture and how it works. And terrorism is an epiphenomenon of image culture.
I learned you have to move fast, writing futuristic satire in America: Before you know it, you're a realist!
I have this dream again and again: I find extra rooms in the place where I live. You could say it's a very New York dream, but I think it's about writing - the feeling that there is something behind a wall or a door.
I'm embarrassed to say this, but I shy away from memoirs. My feeling is always that I'm saving them for later, so I guess that means I'll reach a point when I read nothing else.
Not to brag, but I do think I've gotten pretty adept on PowerPoint... except that I can't figure out how to use Excel!
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.
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 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'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.
Both my own process and that of the publishing industry are just too slow to do anything other than play catch-up when it comes to anticipating change.
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'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.
I think playing the glamour card is a disastrous error as a literary writer.
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.
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.
I love the thriller genre generally. I like murder mysteries and those kinds of adventure stories.
One futuristic novel that had a huge impact on me was Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein,' which is kind of science fiction plus Gothic.
Time is always a component of place; you can't really talk about where without talking about when.
I'm obsessed with the Victorian novel. I can't help it. I feel like the novel then was so powerful and agile in ways I'm not sure it is now.
Reading is a lot like eating for me: If I try to read a book I'm not hungry for, I won't enjoy it, but if I wait until I have a real appetite for something, I'll devour it.
With 'The Keep,' I began with a theory about pitting the isolated disconnection of the gothic realm against present-day hyperconnectedness. I emerged feeling that the gothic genre is all about hyperconnectedness - the possibility of disembodied communication - and that we now live in a kind of permanently gothic state.
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.
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.
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.
But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.
You can start imagining all kinds of things characters would feel, but you have to have a sense of whether those imaginings might be right.
If you can write any way and it's working out, just bow down in gratitude.
Invention and memory are so close together in the place they occupy in my brain.
I often felt like that Mr. Magoo figure in the cartoon, who just wanders through traffic, and somehow it never hits him. I kind of feel that way about my whole childhood: Why do I have a normal life?
After 9/11, the U.S. seemed vulnerable for the first time in a long time. We were no longer the superpower that no other country could touch. I thought, 'When and how did that dominance begin?'
I never did anything original my whole childhood. I was invisible.
I would go so far as to say that I mostly write terrible things. I mean, my first drafts are so appalling.
I haven't read a lot of science fiction, and I never intend to write it; it seems to happen a little bit inadvertently for me, in that I'm trying to follow people into points in their lives that demand that I investigate the future.
When I think about a book like 'A Clockwork Orange,' which I really loved, the weird hybrid language is what I remember most.
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.
I'm partial to epic poetry, which might be surprising given that I don't write poetry at all. The combination of rollicking storytelling with musical language seems to me the highest achievement.
As a reader and a writer, I'm happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.
I think literary theory satisfied a deep love I have for big, encompassing narratives about the world and how it works - which are usually, in the end, more creative visions unto themselves than illuminating explanations.
I'm a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.
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.
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.
