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

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

"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."

"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."

"I always wanted to be a designer. I read books on fashion from the age of 12."

"I write my novels longhand. I love the feeling of writing; I love to see pen on paper. It feels more creative than typing, and it's a more visual process for me - I can picture the entire scene in my head and am merely writing what I see."

"In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word 'frustration'."

"When I turned 19 I kinda realized that I needed to write my own songs instead of singing songs written by other people."