The best thing we can bring to any fight is a calm and compassionate mind.

It is very easy for us to go, you know, "I am being cruel to be kind," when really we are just ... being cruel. Because it makes us feel big, or whatever.

Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.

One of the ideas that runs through this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] is this Buddhist notion that the mind is incredibly powerful; not the brain but the mind.

What concerns me most is the horrible degradation our notions of truth, civility, and decency have undergone. Also the way that language has been malformed - we have been overcome with banality and the cynical misuse of language. When a candidate runs a campaign on a series of dog-whistles to bigots, then turns around and talks about "healing the wounds of division," that is right out of Orwell.

It blew my mind, reading Swing Time, that I could take any sentence in the book, and it was one of the most beautiful sentences written in English.

As a kid, I had a real fascination with perverse, off-color, and kind of risky things, and I also had a very sanctimonious Catholic, purist side.