You don't want to spend your life writing about stuff that doesn't matter. You want to try to pull out of the temporal mediocre and write in a way that is meaningful to everybody. This goes back to this idea of being intimate with your reader. Since we're all down here and we're all dying and aspiring and loving and feeling inadequate, all these things that we all are doing all the time, what a relief it is, when somebody looks at you and says, "Yeah, me too."

There were several points where I would kind of turn to the book and say, "Get thee behind me." I don't think real novelists do that. But I make a distinction between prose that's very efficiency-minded (like, the minimum I can get away with), versus loosening the screws and letting the words spill out beautifully and so on.

One of the sad things about this political season is that it allows [requires] us to get behind our big "Liberal" or "Conservative" banner and forget, for a time, that the big problems in our country have been around a long time and have been batted back and forth, caused and exacerbated, by both sides, and are more spiritual or ethical than [merely] political.

My habit would have been to veer towards the dark - to prove I was something; edgy, or maybe to prove that I was cognisant of the dark side. Now, with age and confidence, I can say, yeah, that's true, but I am cognisant of the fact that people can do things well. And can be more loving than you expect.

I read to make myself feel awake.

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.

Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.