The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.

Whole swaths of the book [Lincoln in the Bardo] are made up of verbatim quotes from various historical sources, which I cut up and rearranged to form part of the narrative.

Twitter is a deliberate abstention. Somehow I hate the idea of there always being, in the back of my mind, this little voice saying: 'Oh, I should tweet about this.'

I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.

I sometimes imagine a great writer as a sort of God-surrogate: the writer is doing his or her human-best to emulate what God might think of is, if God was inclined to observe some human beings and present their activities in the form of a narrative.

Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.

It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed to know to answer all the questions of the universe. Wouldn't that be freaky? Whereas the probability is high that there is a vast reality that we have no way to perceive, that's actually bearing down on us now and influencing everything.