The past is always tense, the future perfect.

She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.

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.

Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.

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.

I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.

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