As much as we - in a revisionist way - tell ourselves that we've always been a righteous country with a couple of swerves off the path, we need to look back and see that we've always also been a racist country and have had a tendency towards banal aggressiveness. The thing that's alarming is not so much that a few people in America at the top are initiating these crazy policies, but that the middle is willing to go there too. There's a strange movement of the middle to this position of banal aggressiveness.

Now, we don't really believe these things - intellectually we know better - but we believe them viscerally, and live by them, and they cause us to prioritize our own needs over the needs of others, even though what we really want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more aware of what's actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving.

When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.

My mind has an obsessive, neurotic quality, but I also have a very hard work ethic. I know that a lot of people think, oh, you have a wild imagination. I don't, really. If ten people are sitting around and someone says, "Hey complete this sentence in a funny way," I'm never ahead of the pack.

That underscored this idea that when we're reading a book or writing a book, you're in an act of co-creation. The reader and the writer are both trying to dress up and present their best selves and then there's that moment, when suddenly, as a reader, you're not exactly you anymore, and likewise, as a writer, you're not really you.

There are some things fundamentally off about the stance of the book. And maybe that's okay; maybe every book is flawed, and great books, as flawed as they might be, articulate a moral argument that the reader then carries forward. The critique to this model is, of course, to ask: Should a book be ever so perfect that you come out of it with complete moral agreement that can be sustained?

Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.