I always cheerfully say, "Well, you know, the species is adapting, and whatever it needs to do, it'll do," but I do think it's maybe a little bit alarming. Everybody knows that one thing we really have to do is to be more wherever we are, more present, that's just kind of a commonplace. And the whole mobile phone thing is completely 100% the opposite - to never be where you are because you can always be somewhere else; and yet it's so fun and addictive.

One of the revelations in that book [Lincoln in the Bardo] for me was this idea about citizenship. Even that word - citizenship - for someone my age, it makes me cringe. But, to me, the political space we're in now argues for a reboot of fairly simple ideas and the examination of the way that Americans have not been living into them.

A writer writes what interests him and what he can manage, and what he can make live, as Flannery O'Connor said. So my reaction to someone saying "You must!" or "You should!" or even "Hey, why don't you?" is basically to sort of shrug and politely walk off and do whatever I want to do. It's nobody else's business, really, and even if I happened to agree with one of those "musts" or "shoulds" what would I do about it, if my heart wasn't in it?

I think when you see [Donald] Trump in person, my reaction is you kind of enjoy it. It's kind of an enjoyable night out.

I think people have come to expect that in artistic representation; that every work of art should be a work of extravagant hope.

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil."

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.