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.

I think it's basically the same game, although with a public figure like [Donald] Trump I think you are bound to consider the public persona rather than the private one. At least that was the case with that piece of writing.

Whatever happens when we die, it would be really weird if it was what we had expected. Even if you were a lifelong Christian believer, it would be kind of weird if there actually were pearly gates.

Honestly, the choice is: I can be a cheerful person, more awake to correction, more of a force for good ... when I'm writing. Or I can be the opposite of all those things, when I'm not writing.

I think kindness is a sort of gateway virtue - having that simple aspiration can get you into deep water very quickly - in a good way.

With fiction, and also with nonfiction that you can take your time doing, you have a much better chance of reaching across the divide and connecting with somebody who is opposed to you on some things. They're opposed to you on one axis, which is politics, but if you go over the axis called puppies, you might find some common ground.

[Reading Swing Time] made me a feel a little bit like when I used to read David [Foster] Wallace. Like, "I can't play that game. I wish I could, but I can't do it."