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

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.

Music and time have such an interesting relationship. Music makes time fall away like almost nothing else. You hear a song from another moment of your life and it really is like you're still there. That's why the music of our youth ends up being particularly powerful. The coming of age music that you grab a hold of as the symbol or the expression of your independence and hopes for the future and anger and rebellion or whatever it is you're feeling is so powerful for the rest of your life when you hear it.

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

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 ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.

At night, the house thick with sleep, she would peer out her bedroom window at the trees and sky and feel the presence of a mystery. Some possibility that included her--separate from her present life and without its limitations. A secret. Riding in the car with her father, she would look out at other cars full of people she'd never seen, any one of whom she might someday meet and love, and would feel the world holding her making its secret plans.