Jennifer Egan: 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.

I think the one thing that's changed over time is that I've come to realize, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don't think it will work out, doesn't mean that it actually won't.

I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.

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

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.

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. 

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 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. 

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.

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

JENNIFER EGAN