Jennifer Egan: And the question is, which one is really "you.

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.

Jennifer Egan

opposites writing way

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

Jennifer Egan

resistance adversity persons

There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.

Jennifer Egan

hard-work winning fiction

Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff...forms a base on which to build something better.

Jennifer Egan

form stuff writing

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.

Jennifer Egan

reading writing culture

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.

Jennifer Egan

bullshit writing lying

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

Jennifer Egan

change said

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

Jennifer Egan

wall water laughing

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. Before the age of technology, it was also easier to just disappear from the face of the earth.

Jennifer Egan

teenager technology people

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.

Jennifer Egan

tolerate circumstances way

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.

Jennifer Egan

writing ideas interesting

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.

Jennifer Egan

lunch girl years

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

Jennifer Egan

assistants gratitude appreciation

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

Jennifer Egan

alex shells essence

Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.

Jennifer Egan

scent smell fear

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

Jennifer Egan

core results

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.

Jennifer Egan

circles light hair

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.

Jennifer Egan

squad usual book

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.

Jennifer Egan

brother mother kids

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

Jennifer Egan

knows want looks