One of the revelations in that book [Lincoln in the Bardo] for me was this idea about citizenship. Even that word - citizenship - for someone my age, it makes me cringe. But, to me, the political space we're in now argues for a reboot of fairly simple ideas and the examination of the way that Americans have not been living into them.

The way I understood purgatory - and maybe you've got a different version - but in Chicago in the '70s, the idea was it was like detention. You had screwed up and you go over there in purgatory and you sit there until the end of days and then we'll decide. You'd made your mistake, and you were in prison, and it's not terrible and it's not great, and you feel a little crappy because you were not in the presence of God.

"Kindness" can mean a lot of different things. In this case, I felt I had to present his [Donald Trump's] supporters in as fair a light as possible - many of them hadn't been interviewed before and that entailed some interviewer-courtesy in the editing and so on.

I always cheerfully say, "Well, you know, the species is adapting, and whatever it needs to do, it'll do," but I do think it's maybe a little bit alarming. Everybody knows that one thing we really have to do is to be more wherever we are, more present, that's just kind of a commonplace. And the whole mobile phone thing is completely 100% the opposite - to never be where you are because you can always be somewhere else; and yet it's so fun and addictive.

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.

I've had the thought that a person's 'artistic vision' is really just the cumulative combination of whatever particular stances he has sincerely occupied during his creative life - even if some of those might appear contradictory.

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil." I think even like Saddam Hussein or Hitler would wake up and say, "I think it's going to be a good day. I'm gonna do some really important work." And given their definition of good, they went out and did horrible things.