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

It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.

It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.

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

In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.

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

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.