I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.

To me that really would be the essence of kindness, to have one's awareness so developed and refined that you could tell just what was needed, and not do any more or any less, and maybe not even be aware of what you had done, except it would be a helpful thing because of how fully present you were. Well, as Aerosmith once famously said: Dream on.

I had an experience a few years ago where I was on a plane in which one of the engines went out. I couldn't even remember my name. I was just repeating the word no over and over.

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life" -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

My mind goes really quickly and I tend to talk really fast, as you've probably heard, I sometimes lose track of my syntax, as I'm talking that fast. The only thing I try to do, well, it's slow down, but also I do something when I'm reading that's similar to when I'm writing a section, which is to really try to imagine you on the other side, in a certain way, as an intelligent, sympathetic presence who's rooting for me to tell you a good story.

As a writer I'm essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.

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.