I'm a big fan of the Russians: Isaac Babel is just an exquisite line-to-line stylist.

I'm fascinated with actors, and I've never quite understood the process.

I've found that my first drafts are not so special. But the more I work on them, the better they get. They are more unique and defensible.

I was raised Catholic,I took from that was a sense of theater and drama, and also the idea that there were truths that couldn't actually be uttered directly but really had to be reached through ritual. You come out of those Masses so moved, and you're like, "Why did that happen?" And the truth of it is that it happened through an hour of highly enacted ritual.

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

I'm not thinking in any big thematic or conceptual terms - especially in this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] when I was trying to make the voices more active, more energetic.

It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.