I guess: People who are comfortable enough with reality to allow other sorts of realities and other mindsets to just be, and then to regard these with real interest and joy [and the joy appears in the prose quality itself].

The greatest thing about writing a book is that at first it's all inchoate, but the more you work on it, the more the book teaches you its internal rules.

I was a straight arrow, a control freak. I didn't do drugs or drink, and this was the '70s. I didn't like the loss of control. Which isn't exactly right, because I didn't know what happened when you did drugs.

I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.

I would say one thing writing this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] did for me was underscore the fact that this issue [all men are created equal] has never been properly addressed and it hasn't gone away.

As a young kid I assumed that everybody was sort of on the same wavelength as I was and then I found out in a lot of small ways that that wasn't the case. It's sort of a mixed blessing. My mind is like a puppy. It goes all over. I guess writing fiction was a way of harnessing that. I could hook a puppy up to a treadmill and get something out of it.

What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.