All traditions are also full of meanness for the sake of meanness.

I love the idea that more people would read short fiction. I think it's such a humanizing form. It softens the boundaries between people.

The writer has to make pleasure for the reader - which, I think, is done by taking one's character's seriously and taking one's readers seriously -don't condescend or try to be tricky. Be a friend to your reader - I'd say that's a pretty good first step.

I knew if I evoked that stuff too easily or gratuitously, as a way of assuaging my fears of not being edgy or whatever, the writing would fall apart. This book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was going to have to have some earnestness in it.

I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it's a nice way to neutralize that polarization.

Whatever you love, that will be an influence. It just will. So in effect the young writer's job is: go out and find some stuff to love.

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.