I like [Barak] Obama. I like him. So how far does rationality help to persuade anybody? You know, I'm not so sure.

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

There's this de facto assumption that for something to have value, it has to be economically self-supporting - which imposes a very low ceiling on a culture.

Even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good place to play with that thing and to begin to really see it.

There was one sequence of days [making Lincoln in the Bardo] when I had halfway decided to use the historical nuggets, but I wasn't quite sure it would work. I'd be in my room for six or seven hours, cutting up bits of paper with quotes and arranging them on the floor, with this little voice in my head saying, "Hey, this isn't writing!" But at the end of that day, I felt that the resulting section was doing important emotional work

I do find the values in A Christmas Carol significant. It is important not to be mean and stingy and not to give up love for money.

I don't tend to work directly from life, except in trying to mimic or match the outlines of its insanity. In other words, when I live through something, I just try to say to myself, "OK, remember this - life is really this crazy or scary or beautiful or surprising - so try to 'get at' that in your stories.