What's really baffling to me is the way that the technology has risen up to help us become more materialistic.

Nothing will turn you into a Civil War buff like five years of reading. Some of the letters that people wrote from that time are so deep and so beautifully articulate. And you realize, especially with the stuff that's going on now in America, that it's always been chaos - people were disagreeing at least as much as they are now and 20,000 people would die in a day. It's the scale that's amazing, and also the proximity to our own time.

I might take from the current political chaos a desire to somehow reflect its essential qualities in a story - the blatant lies that get accepted with repetition; the way mass media seems to be agitating people en masse; the way, particularly, that a relatively lucky and affluent and privileged population can be undone by a certain spoiled quality; that feeling when two decent people violently disagree, because they are arguing from two non-intersecting data sets - well, the list goes on.

I knew if I evoked that stuff too easily or gratuitously, as a way of assuaging my fears of not being edgy or whatever, the writing would fall apart. This book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was going to have to have some earnestness in it.

I know that my only chance at any kind of depth or profundity is to linger within the story, trying to make it distinguish itself.

If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.

When I think about what fiction does morally, I'm happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities - sort of fragmented.