With nonfiction, I go in trying to be really honest about what my preconceptions are.

The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim.

All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.

In the Buddhist texts, some of them say, when you die, basically that wild horse gets cut loose, and the mind is incredibly powerful and expansive, omniscient and can go anywhere and see anything, but - and this is the catch - it's colored by the habits of thought we made in life.

What was fun for me with this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was to start out with the principle that went, "We're going to fight every day to make this not a novel; make it too short to be a novel." And then with that principle in place, the book sort of starts to say, "Okay, but I really need this. I really need some historical nuggets." And you're like, "All right, but keep it under control."

We've got a real problem with social media that we didn't know we were going to have. It's almost like the demons have gotten out of the box.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.