We spend so much time, these days, on forms of literature that don't rise to be literature, and I'm speaking about Twitter posts and quick and hot ta….

The membrane between where we are right now and a very different reality, is so much thinner than we like to think. Things can go back, and things ca….

I think that fiction has this special responsibility or this special ability to help people to empathize, to demand of people that they understand ot….

One thing we've learned about Donald Trump - this candidate first, president-elect, and now president - is that he has this sort of reptilian instinc….

Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn..

I think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone's mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while..

A book is not a tweet. A book is not a half-hour television show. A book requires for both reader and writer sustained discipline attention. It asks ….

In terms of optimism, I am optimistic. I do think that, in the long term, that America will right itself. I have to think so..

I think it's a very stark marker of what kind of president we have that, from all available evidence, Donald Trump has not read a book, as an adult. ….

I think it's hard sometimes for people to grapple with the real-life consequences of political change. I think that, we as a culture, feel like polit….

Here in America we have a man [Donald Trump] who is a master of a medium that is all about self-aggrandizement and/or cruelty to others. I have been ….

The election of Donald Trump is, to me, this very clownish personality with no political experience, who had literally been using fascist slogans in ….

One thing that fiction does is it allows us to take big picture questions, big issues, big moral and socio-political changes and see how they play ou….

History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things..

We forget the conditions - not only in slavery - but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opp….

There is no shortage of ways that people profit indirectly from the misery and cruelty in other places. Even now, the shirts we wear and the tomatoes….

Our political divides have become our personal divides..

A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood..

It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the mos….

It is part of what makes America great. That tradition of the free press, and also the tradition of this highly competitive market for investigative ….

It is really something, the extent to which we allow ourselves to live without thinking of things that we know, in the abstract, are bad, and are goi….