I read to make myself feel awake.

From the perspective of someone with two grown and wonderful kids, that your instincts as parents are correct: a minute spent reading to your kids now will repay itself a million-fold later, not only because they love you for reading to them, but also because, years later, when they’re gone and miles away, those quiet evenings, when you were tucked in with them, everything quiet but the sound of the page-turns, will, seem to you, I promise...... sacred.

I was, not an altar boy, but a reader of the Epistle, and I walked in on a nun and a priest furiously French kissing when I was in seventh grade. I walked in, saw it, and went, "No way," backed out, composed myself, and went back in, and it was still going on. And the experience of seeing that was actually very deep.

When I was a kid, I took 'The Brady Bunch' and 'The Partridge Family' very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.

While writing this book [Lincoln in the Bardo], [idea of inclusion] occurred to me, you either believe in the Constitution or you don't. If you do, it's intense in what it wants of us.

All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.

I try to keep my artistic opinions not so much "to myself" but "on myself."