It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.

The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.

These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained.

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

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.