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 understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.

Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.

Whole swaths of the book [Lincoln in the Bardo] are made up of verbatim quotes from various historical sources, which I cut up and rearranged to form part of the narrative.

Compassion doesn't have to be weak or enabling; it can also be quite bold.

I grew up in Chicago on the South Side, and had a ton of freedom, just did whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. At the risk of sounding dopey, I would say it was blissful.

When I think about what fiction does morally, I'm happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities - sort of fragmented.