Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.

An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply

I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.

Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.

Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.

You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.

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.