An Artist's Job Is To Be Interested

I Turned 54 This Year And I Find Myself Feeling Like I'm In A Bit Of A Race To Get Down On Paper The Way I Really Feel About Life - Or The Way It Has Presented To Me. And Because It Has Presented To Me Very Beautifully, This Is Hard. It Is Technically Very Hard To Show Positive Manifestations.

The Beginning [of Lincoln In The Bardo] Is Strange, And I Did A Lot Of Work Calibrating That So That A Reader With A Certain Level Of Patience Would Get Through It And In The Nick Of Time Start To Figure Out What Was Going On. In A Short Book, You Can Do That.

I Have A Lot Of Theories About The Beneficial Effects Of Fiction, But I'm Always Trying To Get Away From Them A Little Bit.

I Live Up In The Hills, And I Don't Have Any Cable, And I Have Really Slow Satellite, So That Does It - Because Being On The Internet Is Okay, But It Takes A Long Time. I Have A Prediction That At Some Point, There Will Be A Backlash. Like At The End Of The '60s, There Was That Back-to-the-land Movement, And I'm Guessing That People Will Start Consciously Saying, "i'm Not Taking The Phone With Me," Or "i'm Only Checking Email X Number Of Times A Day," Or "i'm Not Ever Gonna Self-google," For Example.

When Somebody You've Known For 20 Years, And With Whom You Have A Full Context, Winks At You Or Whatever, It Can Be Huge. I Think In A Sense What You're Trying To Re-create In Fiction Is That.