The book says [Lincoln in the Bardo],"I really need this sci-fi device of a ghost inhabiting another person." You say okay kind of begrudgingly. So the structure seemed informed by need and efficiency.

I guess: People who are comfortable enough with reality to allow other sorts of realities and other mindsets to just be, and then to regard these with real interest and joy [and the joy appears in the prose quality itself].

The idea of inclusion has become kind of a stone that we've passed our hand over so many times that it doesn't mean anything.

If I find myself being too earnest and sentimental and hyperbolic and simplistic, which is definitely a tendency I have, then I bring in this perverse henchman.

The universal human laws - need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.

The millions or billions of micro decisions that you're going to make, that's what will determine who you are as a writer, not you deciding in advance.

I was raised Catholic,I took from that was a sense of theater and drama, and also the idea that there were truths that couldn't actually be uttered directly but really had to be reached through ritual. You come out of those Masses so moved, and you're like, "Why did that happen?" And the truth of it is that it happened through an hour of highly enacted ritual.