I'm comfortable with anything after the fact.

I'm not thinking in any big thematic or conceptual terms - especially in this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] when I was trying to make the voices more active, more energetic.

I've been reading about and writing about the Civil War period and it is so striking that slavery was never made right - [Abraham] Lincoln was killed, Reconstruction came along, and all of that inequity was frozen in place and carried forward rather smugly. So I think the burden is now upon us white people, to say that this systemic inequality offends us.

What once were two, are one

As a young kid I assumed that everybody was sort of on the same wavelength as I was and then I found out in a lot of small ways that that wasn't the case. It's sort of a mixed blessing. My mind is like a puppy. It goes all over. I guess writing fiction was a way of harnessing that. I could hook a puppy up to a treadmill and get something out of it.

You can say you're a liberal and everybody laughs and it's a good time.

When I write I know that I'm going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need.