It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.

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.

When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, "Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure."

Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]

Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

Full stories are as rare as honesty.