I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.

I am trying to remember that things have certainly been crazier in human history and they may get crazier here and now, and [here I am trying to be optimistic] it's even a good thing, to be going through all of this, if only to be reminded that history hasn't stopped - human existence is as fundamentally unmanageable now as it ever was.

Success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it... Err in the direction of kindness.

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.

Maybe you could even think 100,000 people are inside each human being. And you drop a novel on that person, and a certain number of those sub-people come alive or get reenergized for some finite time.

I sometimes think that I can't do the bigger thing that [Zadie Smith] do so beautifully, as in Swing Time, with so much world in it and so much rapturous paint thrown around. I don't think it would be possible to write a book on that scale with as much OCD as I have.

The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.