It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.

It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy

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.

Time is how you spend your love.

For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.