America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.

Just through the process of trying to make the living and the dead feel real, all these little benefits came out. And these benefits turned out to be much more articulate statements of what I really believe. And somehow they were more convincing because they were arrived at at such length.

My go-to default is to try to be nice, which I feel does less harm in the long run than trying to be, say, assertive. If I am nice and maybe too passive, I find that easier to live with.

Whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.

The traveller must, of course, always be cautious of the overly broad generalisation. But I am an American, and a paucity of data does not stop me from making sweeping, vague, conceptual statements and, if necessary, following these statements up with troops.

Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

From the beginning [of the Lincoln in the Bardo], I actually had it in mind not to write a novel. I'd kind of gotten past that point where I felt bad for never having written a novel, even to where I felt really good about it, like I was a real purist.