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.

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 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.

I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments.

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

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.

If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.

It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

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 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 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.

Remaining a pop phenomenon for 20 years without dying or lapsing into self-parody is quite a feat.

My first attempt at writing a novel was horrible. I had to throw it away. But I stuck with the idea, which is what became 'The Invisible Circus.'

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.

I grew up in the 1970s, and my friends and I felt very keenly that we had missed the '60s. We were bummed out about it.

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.

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.

If you read novels of the 19th century, they're pretty experimental. They take lots of chances; they seem to break a lot of rules. You've got omniscient narrators lecturing at times to the reader in first person. If you go back to the earliest novels, this is happening to a wild extent, like 'Tristram Shandy' or 'Don Quixote'.

I wasn't a kid who wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a doctor. I was kind of morbid. I was really into the body and how it could go wrong. I wanted to dig up bodies from the graveyard.

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

I love the thriller genre generally. I like murder mysteries and those kinds of adventure stories.

If you can write any way and it's working out, just bow down in gratitude.

I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. 'Goon Squad' provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out 'The Who,' which was my absolute favorite band.

I blurb a lot of books by women, and I'm eager to provide encouragement and support for young women.

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

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

'Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

When I first had a child, I really had a hard time trying to figure out how it was all going to fit together. Because I felt like, when I was with him, I wanted to be writing and I should be writing. And when I was writing, I felt like I should be with him, and wanted to be with him. So I was unhappy a lot.

It's our job as fiction writers to provide a delight that nothing else can - to such a degree that people have no choice but to read our work. Now that's a very tall order, if not impossible. But why not try?

Nowadays I'm more interested in what you'd call 'alternative.' Lately we've been listening to a lot of Mumford & Sons, and Jenny Owen Youngs. I'm also pretty crazy about the Kings of Convenience, a Norwegian band that's been compared to Simon and Garfunkel.

The book that is the closest genetically to 'Goon Squad' is 'Look at Me.' It has the futuristic element - although, freakishly, almost every aspect I invented has come to pass in some way, including the terrorist who fantasies about blowing up the World Trade Centre. That was extremely uncomfortable. The book came out on the week of 9/11.

I write totally spontaneously. I actually write fiction by hand - that always seems to startle people. I think the reason I do that is to bypass the thinking part of me and get to the more unconscious part, which is where all the good ideas seem to be.

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?

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.

I always feel very afraid as I work on books. It's just so hard to write a decent book!

I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, 'I'm going to ace this.' It's just not who I am.

The sheer sensory experience of San Francisco is unlike anywhere else. Not just the physical beauty, but the textures, the feel, the wind, the ocean. It's a monumental feeling unrivaled by anywhere else. Its a world class, gorgeous city. And the coffee is great.

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.

People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had 'The Who' and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the '80s had other songs and bands. It's a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally.

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.

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 love the infinite variety of New York, how it's the epicenter of so many worlds.

Proust, my big inspiration for 'Goon Squad,' uses music a lot in his novel, both in terms of plot and structure. I liked the idea of doing the same thing, which is one reason I structured 'Goon Squad' as a record album, with an A side and a B side, that's built around the contrasting sounds of the individual numbers in it.

I was obsessed with The Who. I would have accepted a marriage proposal from Roger Daltrey on the spot. I went to all of their shows in San Francisco and some in L.A. That was as close as I got to being a groupie.

In the case of 'Goon Squad,' which sold slowly for a long time despite the good reviews, those 'best of 2010' lists were pivotal, and made the book really sell.

What lists and awards don't measure - and I feel this strongly - is the lasting value of any work of art. They're a snapshot of a moment, and one should always consider their judgments in that context.

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 realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don't think it will work out, doesn't mean that it actually won't.

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.