Honestly, the choice is: I can be a cheerful person, more awake to correction, more of a force for good ... when I'm writing. Or I can be the opposite of all those things, when I'm not writing.

I'm always aware of writing around things I can't do, and I've come to think that that's actually what 'style' is - an avoidance of your deficiencies.

What evil does first in the world, maybe, is distract us from our pursuit of goodness.

I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time. And then you can really surprise yourself. There's that cliche, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader!"

I sometimes think that I can't do the bigger thing that [Zadie Smith] do so beautifully, as in Swing Time, with so much world in it and so much rapturous paint thrown around. I don't think it would be possible to write a book on that scale with as much OCD as I have.

She said America was a spoiled child ignorant of grief.

Later, I went one step further, by putting in some invented "historical" bits [into the Lincoln in the Bardo]. And reading those alongside the actual historical bits was like looking into a sort of a painful mirror, because "my" parts were so show-offy at first. They stood out because they were so flamboyant.