Success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it... Err in the direction of kindness.

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.

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

All of this strife on the political front might just be the death throes of another set of [less-honorable] American beliefs, that have, at their core, the notion that equality is something the privileged group "gives" to those not so privileged - a reaching down, as it were.

From the beginning [of the Lincoln in the Bardo], I actually had it in mind not to write a novel. I'd kind of gotten past that point where I felt bad for never having written a novel, even to where I felt really good about it, like I was a real purist.

I had an experience a few years ago where I was on a plane in which one of the engines went out. I couldn't even remember my name. I was just repeating the word no over and over.

He was a father. That's what a father does.Eases the burdens of those he loves. Saves the ones he loves from painful last images that might endure for a lifetime.