What was fun for me with this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was to start out with the principle that went, "We're going to fight every day to make this not a novel; make it too short to be a novel." And then with that principle in place, the book sort of starts to say, "Okay, but I really need this. I really need some historical nuggets." And you're like, "All right, but keep it under control."

Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible.

As a kid, I had a real fascination with perverse, off-color, and kind of risky things, and I also had a very sanctimonious Catholic, purist side.

Success makes opportunities and so many of those "opportunities" are actually exemptions - from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.

The scariest thought in the world is that someday I'll wake up and realize I've been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual.

This - where we are now - is where a culture gets to, when it has chosen, for many years, banality over intelligence, the literal over the immaterial or complex, materialism over spirituality. This is the result of many years of disrespecting the intellectual project - of a collective acceptance of the idea that thinking and reasoning and reading deeply in difficult text and being respectful of history are somehow "wimpy" or secondary.

I grew up in Chicago on the South Side, and had a ton of freedom, just did whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. At the risk of sounding dopey, I would say it was blissful.