I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.
Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.
There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.
I'm not a doom-and-gloom person. But I think there is a difference between transcendence and denial, and much of the Western world is in major denial today.
The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
If you are 'too busy' most of the time, or locked behind closed doors, no mentoring relationship can work.
From the beginning [of the Lincoln in the Bardo], I actually had it in mind not to write a novel. I'd kind of gotten past that point where I felt bad for never having written a novel, even to where I felt really good about it, like I was a real purist.