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.

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

For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.

For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.

I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.

It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.