[Lincoln in the Bardo] is not a long book. And that meant I could obsess over it and live in it both backwards and forwards and hyper-control everything.

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.

Success is like a mountain in front of you that keeps growing. If you're not careful, it will take up your whole life.

I think if someone could demonstrate to me that fiction did no good, I would still do it, because I think it does good for me.

In the Buddhist texts, some of them say, when you die, basically that wild horse gets cut loose, and the mind is incredibly powerful and expansive, omniscient and can go anywhere and see anything, but - and this is the catch - it's colored by the habits of thought we made in life.

When I wrote that [Donald] Trump piece, I had this uncomfortable experience of sensing a lot of things that were nascent, that I couldn't quite articulate. And one of them was this move toward anti-intellectualism. An anti-love move, even.

Err in the direction of kindness.