Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.

...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.

'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.