As Flannery O'Connor says, a person can choose what she writes but she can't choose what she makes live. Some people are really acoustic writers and so for them the secret revision is sound. Other people may revise in terms of the way a paragraph feels. There's a million ways to do it.

"Kindness" can mean a lot of different things. In this case, I felt I had to present his [Donald Trump's] supporters in as fair a light as possible - many of them hadn't been interviewed before and that entailed some interviewer-courtesy in the editing and so on.

One lesson I learned the hard way, early in my career, was that if I tried to write to be smart or to convey a theme or from some existing plan, the result was usually pretty boring. My intuitive move, whenever I'm considering writing something, is to steer towards what feels enjoyable. Another way of saying it is, you just try to avoid the "sucky." If you start to think of a story and a way to tell it, and your reaction is kind of like, Ugh, that's going to be hard, then you don't want to do that.

One of the ideas that runs through this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] is this Buddhist notion that the mind is incredibly powerful; not the brain but the mind.

Your first responsibility is to yourself and to your own goodness of heart.

Nostalgia is, 'Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?'

If you start with the idea that you are going to be writing about a night in a graveyard, and that there are only a few living people in that frame, all sorts of interesting and difficult technical problems arise. And then form - new form, or experimental form - might be understood as just trying to tell that story most movingly and efficiently.