…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith

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

Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.

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.

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.

Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.