Quotes from Jennifer Egan

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

Comparison is painful. Don't be cowed by other people's pretty pictures. When you feel unimpressive, or irrelevant, that has nothing to do with what you're actually capable of.

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

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.

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 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.

When I'm not writing, I feel an awareness that something's missing. If I go a long time, it becomes worse. I become depressed. There's something vital that's not happening.

When I pick up a book that's, you know, wreathed in laurels, I expect a lot, and that doesn't give the book its best chance to shine.

I write with pen and paper, my first draft, on legal pads.

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?'

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.

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.

I number my drafts, and by the time a book is done, I'll have 75 or 80 drafts of some sections.

I teach intermittently, and while I enjoy it, I don't find that it's a calling for me.

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.

Life itself is so surprising, a predictable story is unsatisfying.

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.

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

I think a playful critique is good for all of us, and that's basically how I see satire functioning. But I'm not interested in a kind of contemptuous satirical vision; I try always, even when I'm knowingly being satirical, to also be humane, but I mean, let's face it: there's plenty in American life to make fun of, and we all participate in it.

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.

I write to escape from my life. Writing about men separates 'me' from my work in a way that I find comforting.

Time is always a component of place; you can't really talk about where without talking about when.

Like many people of my generation, I feel like I survived my adolescent mischief only by a miracle, and it seems too much to hope for that the same miracle would befall my children - therefore, I want to make sure they take fewer chances than I did.

Criticism is fine and conversation is fine, but the person who's criticizing should know what they're saying and whom they're criticizing.