Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

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

Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.

The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.

People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.

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.