I'm not thinking in any big thematic or conceptual terms - especially in this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] when I was trying to make the voices more active, more energetic.

I'm a big fan of the Russians: Isaac Babel is just an exquisite line-to-line stylist.

If I can be more efficient, I'm actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.

If you're going to make an emotional connection with somebody, whether it's in the story or in the world, there's a certain amount of self-acceptance that is required.

You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.

Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.

We all think we know what happens after death. But maybe it's going to be not only weird but also dorky and comic and inconsistent.