For me, when I'm coming up to a place where I have to make somebody up, it's almost like driving and taking your hands off the wheel.

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 think when you see [Donald] Trump in person, my reaction is you kind of enjoy it. It's kind of an enjoyable night out.

Whole swaths of the book [Lincoln in the Bardo] are made up of verbatim quotes from various historical sources, which I cut up and rearranged to form part of the narrative.

The best thing that ever happened to me is that nothing happened in writing. I ended up working for engineering companies, and that's where I found my material, in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace. Being broke and tired, you don't come home your best self.

What concerns me most is the horrible degradation our notions of truth, civility, and decency have undergone. Also the way that language has been malformed - we have been overcome with banality and the cynical misuse of language. When a candidate runs a campaign on a series of dog-whistles to bigots, then turns around and talks about "healing the wounds of division," that is right out of Orwell.

I try to keep my artistic opinions not so much "to myself" but "on myself."