The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.

I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.

Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.

I was thinking about the generation before us, like John Barth and all of those pomo dudes who had that idea of, instead of hiding the structure and making it look organic and natural, we're going to put the structure on the outside. But most of the time, at least for me, all I could attend to [in Swing Time] was that act of structural self-consciousness.

There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.

A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.