In real life, when you have an emotional experience, it's never just because of the thing that's been said. There's the backstory. It's like [Ernest] Hemingway's iceberg theory - the current emotional moment is the tip of the iceberg and all of the past is the seven-eighths of the iceberg that's underwater.

People who've written about Abraham Lincoln's writing emphasize how logical he was. His writing was a syllogistic tool. He would say, if A, then B, and he would reason through it. His late writing especially is so tight and so beautifully reasoned.

I think that feels like it to me. I mean whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.

When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn't see it. He can't. He's average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.

I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.

It blew my mind, reading Swing Time, that I could take any sentence in the book, and it was one of the most beautiful sentences written in English.

When you write an essay, of course you're going to get pushback, but you're going to be allowed to make your case at leisure. You're going to be allowed to take into account possible objections and to fully humanize your reader. That feels to me like a much more sane thing to do.