Jennifer Egan

some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.

I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.

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 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.

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

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.

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?

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.

Training readers to expect a voice or subject matter from me would interfere with the reinvention I crave. At the same time, I feel almost too able to disappear at times.

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.

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.

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.

I learned you have to move fast, writing futuristic satire in America: Before you know it, you're a realist!

I have a tendency to coddle my sons because I want to keep them safe, but I also want them to be strong and independent and curious and bold, and I worry that my coddling is going to have exactly the opposite effect.

The part of the process that's exciting to me is feeling like I'm in a place I've never been before, in every way. Without that, I don't know if I'd be a writer.

I grew up thinking you're either a winner in the world, or you're not. I presumed I was not. I had no reason to think I would be, and my inclination is towards self-deprecation. I wish I'd known no one was judging my every move, but I'm still like this!

If I'm doing something I know I can pull off, then that's not the book I should be writing.

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.

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.

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 think the big lesson I've learned is that it's very hard to write satire in America because almost immediately, whatever you've thought of turns out to come true, or sometimes it already was true.