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And So, A Prediction, And My Heartfelt Wish For You: As You Get Older, Your Self Will Diminish And You Will Grow In Love. You Will Gradually Be Replaced By Love. If You Have Kids, That Will Be A Huge Moment In Your Process Of Self-diminishment. You Really Won't Care What Happens To You, As Long As They Benefit. That's One Reason Your Parents Are So Proud And Happy Today. One Of Their Fondest Dreams Has Come True: You Have Accomplished Something Difficult And Tangible That Has Enlarged You As A Person And Will Make Your Life Better, From Here On In, Forever.

-George Saunders

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And So, A Prediction,

George Saunders

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And So, A Prediction, And My Heartfelt Wish For You: As You Get Older, Your Self Will Diminish And You Will Grow In Love. You Will Gradually Be Replaced By Love. If You Have Kids, That Will Be A Huge Moment In Your Process Of Self-diminishment. You Really Won't Care What Happens To You, As Long As They Benefit. That's One Reason Your Parents Are So Proud And Happy Today. One Of Their Fondest Dreams Has Come True: You Have Accomplished Something Difficult And Tangible That Has Enlarged You As A Person And Will Make Your Life Better, From Here On In, Forever.

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I'm Trying To Read/edit My Story As If I Have No Existing Knowledge Of The Story, No Investment In It, No Sense Of What Herculean Effort Went Into Writing Page 23, No Pretensions As To Why The Dull Patch On Page 4 Is Important For The Fireworks That Will Happen On Page 714.

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.

The Internet Kind Of Feels Like Happiness Sometimes, However. It Feels Like Stimulation.

One Of The Ideas That Runs Through This Book [lincoln In The Bardo] Is This Buddhist Notion That The Mind Is Incredibly Powerful; Not The Brain But The Mind.

I'm Fascinated With Actors, And I've Never Quite Understood The Process.

I Often Think About Image, And Image Is Something That - But In Truth, The Real Artistic Process, As I've Understood It, Is 95 Percent Intuitive, Like Seat-of-the-pants, At-the-moment Decisions That You Can't Even Explain, You Know?

I Think The Path For A Young Writer Might Be One That Says, "i Have To Accept Myself, This Is What I Am. I Can't Eradicate My Defects. I Can Work On Them."

My Theory For Nonfiction Is That Nobody Can Be Free Of Some Kind Of Conceptions About Whatever Story They're Writing. But If You Can Find A Way To Build Those Into The Story, Then The Story Becomes A Process Of Deconstructing And Heightening And Sometimes Changing Those Notions And That Makes Dramatic Tension. The Initial Statement Of Your Position, And Then Letting Reality Act On You To Change It, Is Pretty Good Storytelling.

More And More These Days What I Find Myself Doing In My Stories Is Making A Representation Of Goodness And A Representation Of Evil And Then Having Those Two Run At Each Other Full-speed, Like A Couple Of Peewee Football Players, To See What Happens. Who Stays Standing? Whose Helmet Goes Flying Off?

That's What A Story Must Feel Like To Me. It's Not, "i Want To Write About A Gravedigger." But You're Walking Along And - Boop! Shovel. "ok, What Does One Do With A Shovel? Digs A Hole. Why? I Don't Know Yet. Dig The Hole! Oh, Look A Body."

Whatever You Love, That Will Be An Influence. It Just Will. So In Effect The Young Writer's Job Is: Go Out And Find Some Stuff To Love.

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.

Sometimes I Just Turn On The Tv And I'm Like, Wait A Minute, That Guy [donald Trump]? It's Incredible That He Did All Those Things And He Still Won. It's Hard To Process.

If You're Going To Make An Emotional Connection With Somebody, Whether It's In The Story Or In The World, There's A Certain Amount Of Self-acceptance That Is Required.

There's A Really Nice Moment In The Life Of A Piece Of Writing Where The Writer Starts To Get A Feeling Of It Outgrowing Him - Or He Starts To See It Having A Life Of Its Own That Doesn't Have Anything To Do With His Ego Or His Desire To 'be A Good Writer'.

We Have That Illusion That We Are 'deciding' What To Make A Character Do, In Order To 'convey Our Message' Or Something Like That. But, At Least In My Experience, You Are Often More Like A River-rafting Guide Who's Been Paid A Bonus To Purposely Steer Your Clients Into The Roughest Possible Water.

I Think That Tri [to Ram Bahadur Bomjon] Was The First Time I'd Even Seen Something That Made Me Think, Or Really Feel: "ah, I Don't Know What's Really Going On In The World - I Think I Do, And It Feels Like I Do, But Whatever Is Really Going On Is, De Facto, Beyond The Scope Of My Comprehension - The Best We Can Do Is Look For Hints." I'd Known That Intellectually Before But That Was The First Time I Really Believed It Viscerally.

Kindness, It Turns Out, Is Hard - It Starts Out All Rainbows And Puppy Dogs, And Expands To Include . . . Well, Everything.

Down In The City Are The Nice Houses And The So-so Houses And The Lovers Making Out In Dark Yards And The Babies Crying For Their Moms, And I Wonder If, Other Than Jesus, Has This Ever Happened Before. Maybe It Happens All The Time. Maybe There's Angry Dead All Over, Hiding In Rooms, Covered With Blankets, Bossing Around Their Scared, Embarrassed Relatives. Because How Would We Know?

I Keep Thinking Of Robert Stone Making The Distinction Between The Word Sublime And The Word Beautiful. He Described Being In A Battle As Sublime. Because Even Though People Were Dying, It Was Such A Huge Sensory Experience That It Became Sublime.

In Fiction, Conceptualizing, I've Found, Produces Dull And Over-controlled Text.

In A Sense My Whole Life As A Writer Is Trying To Find Structural Ways, Or Formal Ways, To Permit That Outflowing So It Doesn't Just Look Like Crazy Output. In Other Words, If It Turns Out That You Can Do A Given Voice, That's Just Kind Of Inclination. But Then If You Can Find A Way To Put That Voice In A Story So That The Voice Serves A Purpose, Then I Would Say That's Being A Writer.

If You Start With The Idea That You Are Going To Be Writing About A Night In A Graveyard, And That There Are Only A Few Living People In That Frame, All Sorts Of Interesting And Difficult Technical Problems Arise. And Then Form - New Form, Or Experimental Form - Might Be Understood As Just Trying To Tell That Story Most Movingly And Efficiently.

It Was That Impossible Thing: Happiness That Does Not Wilt To Reveal The Thin Shoots Of Some New Desire Rising From Within It.

Impossible Things

Someone Told Me Once - I Mean I Said, "is It Ok That I Don't Really Know What The Three-act Structure Is?" And He Said, "it's Basically: Act 1: A Guy Climbs Up A Tree; Act 2: People Come And Throw Stuff At Him; Act 3: He Gets Down."

The Writer Has To Make Pleasure For The Reader - Which, I Think, Is Done By Taking One's Character's Seriously And Taking One's Readers Seriously -don't Condescend Or Try To Be Tricky. Be A Friend To Your Reader - I'd Say That's A Pretty Good First Step.

What's Really Baffling To Me Is The Way That The Technology Has Risen Up To Help Us Become More Materialistic.

I Started Out In Engineering. I Was A Geophysical Engineer. Throughout The Course Of My Life I've Done A Lot Of Strange Jobs, And The Effect Has Been To Make Me Think A Little More Skeptically About Our Capitalist Society.

The Book Says [lincoln In The Bardo],"i Really Need This Sci-fi Device Of A Ghost Inhabiting Another Person." You Say Okay Kind Of Begrudgingly. So The Structure Seemed Informed By Need And Efficiency.

I Am Always Considering The Reader. Although This Is Admittedly Kind Of Odd: Which Reader? On What Day? In What Mood? For Me, That "reader" Is Actually Just Me, If I Had Never Read The Story Before.

Nothing Will Turn You Into A Civil War Buff Like Five Years Of Reading. Some Of The Letters That People Wrote From That Time Are So Deep And So Beautifully Articulate. And You Realize, Especially With The Stuff That's Going On Now In America, That It's Always Been Chaos - People Were Disagreeing At Least As Much As They Are Now And 20,000 People Would Die In A Day. It's The Scale That's Amazing, And Also The Proximity To Our Own Time.

In Catholicism, We Would Say You're Going To Be Judged, So Therefore You Should Do Better Now. For Me, Buddhism Is Somewhat More Workable Because Instead Of Saying I Have To Do Good, It Says I Have To Notice What I'm Actually Doing.

Whatever Happens When We Die, It Would Be Really Weird If It Was What We Had Expected. Even If You Were A Lifelong Christian Believer, It Would Be Kind Of Weird If There Actually Were Pearly Gates.

All Along, My Mantra Was: Don't Write Unless It Contributes To The Emotion, And Do Anything You Do In Service Of The Emotion Only.

I Was Trained In Seismic Prospecting. We'd Drill A Deep Hole And Put Dynamite In The Bottom And Blow It Up Remotely, Which Would Give You A Cross-sectional Picture Of The Subsurface, Which Tells You Where To Drill.

What Good The Prophet In The Wilderness May Do Is Incremental And Personal. It's Good For Us To Hear Someone Speak The Irrational Truth. It's Good For Us When, In Spite Of All Of The Sober, Pragmatic, And Even Correct Arguments That War Is Sometimes Necessary Someone Says: War Is Large-scale Murder, Us At Our Worst, The Stupidest Guy Doing The Cruelest Thing To The Weakest Being.

Slaughterhouse Five

I Think When You See [donald] Trump In Person, My Reaction Is You Kind Of Enjoy It. It's Kind Of An Enjoyable Night Out.

I Love The Idea That More People Would Read Short Fiction. I Think It's Such A Humanizing Form. It Softens The Boundaries Between People.

Goodbye. I'm Leaving Because I'm Bored.

For Me, The Game Would Be To Assume A Very Intelligent Reader Who Can Extrapolate A Lot From A Little. And That's Become My Definition Of Art; To Get That Pitch Just Right, Where I Can Put A Hint On Page Three, And The Reader's Ears Go Up A Bit, As Opposed To Dropping It All On The First Page.

One Of The Ways That We Cope With Anxiety Is By Over Planning And Over Controlling. If We Know Where It's Going To, We Can Just Relax And Do It. Unfortunately, In My Experience, That's Not The Way It Works. The Story Doesn't Want To Be Told What To Do. You Have To Enter Into This Process With A High Level Of Trust That The Many Hours Of Choosing That You're Doing Every Day Will Gradually Clarify The Narrative For You. And That's What Happens.

Whenever You Talk About Writing I Think You Have To Remember That It All Has A Big Question Mark Over It - Every Word Has A Big Question Mark Over It.

A Work Of Art Is Something Produced By A Person, But Is Not That Person — It Is Of Her, But Is Not Her. It’s A Reach, Really — The Artist Is Trying To Inhabit, Temporarily, A More Compact, Distilled, Efficient, Wittier, More True-seeing, Precise Version Of Herself — One That She Can’t Replicate In So-called ‘real’ Life, No Matter How Hard She Tries. That’s Why She Writes: To Try And Briefly Be More Than She Truly Is.

There Are Some Things Fundamentally Off About The Stance Of The Book. And Maybe That's Okay; Maybe Every Book Is Flawed, And Great Books, As Flawed As They Might Be, Articulate A Moral Argument That The Reader Then Carries Forward. The Critique To This Model Is, Of Course, To Ask: Should A Book Be Ever So Perfect That You Come Out Of It With Complete Moral Agreement That Can Be Sustained?

That's The Only Way That I Can Figure Out How To Live, Is To Say, "well, I Don't Know What This Adds Up To, But I Can Do The Best I Can."

If I'm Writing A Story And You're Reading It, Or Vice Versa, You Took Time Out Of Your Day To Pick Up My Book. I Think The One Thing That Will Kill That Relationship Is If You Feel Me Condescending To You In The Process. And How Does That Happen? Well, It Happens When I Know More Than You Do, And When I Know That I Know More Than You Do, And I'm Holding It Back From You. So That I Can Then Manipulate You At The End. You Know, You Think About Like In A Dating Situation How Terrible That Would Be, It's The Same Thing With A Book.

My Stories, I Can Understand Them As A Little Toy That You Wind Up And You Put It On The Floor And It Just Goes Under The Coach. That I Get. Beyond That, I'm A Little Lost.

The Contours Of The Coming Disaster Expanded To Include The Deaths Of All Present.

Each Of Us Is Born With A Series Of Built-in Confusions That Are Probably Somehow Darwinian. These Are: (1) We're Central To The Universe (that Is, Our Personal Story Is The Main And Most Interesting Story, The Only Story, Really); (2) We're Separate From The Universe (there's Us And Then, Out There, All That Other Junk - Dogs And Swing-sets, And The State Of Nebraska And Low-hanging Clouds And, You Know, Other People), And (3) We're Permanent (death Is Real, O.k., Sure - For You, But Not For Me).

I'm Such A Baby If I Even Get A Flu.

For Me, The Fiction Writer's Job Is To Take The Small, Stupid Process Of Learning To Use An Iphone - And Suddenly You're The Guy Who's Asking Your Daughter, "when I Go On Facebook, Can It See Me?"

Even When The Faith Goes Away, There's That Space Where You Crave Something Bigger Than Yourself. For Me, That's Kind Of Where Art Came In, After That.

Whether You're Eighteen Or Sixty, In A Certain Way, Whatever You Know Is Valid.

It Would Be So Weird If We Knew Just As Much As We Needed To Know To Answer All The Questions Of The Universe. Wouldn't That Be Freaky? Whereas The Probability Is High That There Is A Vast Reality That We Have No Way To Perceive, That's Actually Bearing Down On Us Now And Influencing Everything.

It's A Little Like Packing For A Trip. First You Lay Out Everything That Might Possibly Be Useful, With No Thought About The Size Of Your Suitcase. Then, Look At Your Suitcase. In The Case Of Narrative, There's A Certain Obligation To Keep The Pace Up And Have Each Section Or Subsection Be Doing Something.

The Bottom Line For Me Is That Life Is Short And Art Is Long.

I Don't Really Write Beautifully Naturally, Unlike Some People.

I Was A Straight Arrow, A Control Freak. I Didn't Do Drugs Or Drink, And This Was The '70s. I Didn't Like The Loss Of Control. Which Isn't Exactly Right, Because I Didn't Know What Happened When You Did Drugs.

I Think Fiction Isn't So Good At Being For Or Against Things In General - The Rhetorical Argument A Short Story Can Make Is Only Actualized By The Accretion Of Particular Details, And The Specificity Of These Details Renders Whatever Conclusions The Story Reaches Invalid For Wider Application.

That Seems To Be The Definition Of 'novel' For Me: A Story That Hasn't Yet Discovered A Way To Be Brief.

My Artistic Approach Is That You're Supposed To Be A Little Baffled.

If You Want To Be Good, All You've Got To Do Is Be Good.

I Think The Biggest Single Issue Is Income Inequity And What This Is Doing To The Good Old "american Dream." This And Corporatism - This Delusional Idea That "shareholder Value" Outweighs Everything Else.

For Me, When I'm Coming Up To A Place Where I Have To Make Somebody Up, It's Almost Like Driving And Taking Your Hands Off The Wheel.

As Far As Which Writers Embody This Form Of Gentle Power - Tobias Wolff, For Sure. His Persona And His Writing Both Share An Easy, Capacious Confidence That Says He Has Faith In His Readers.

Every Writer Knows That When You're Imitating Somebody - You Know, You're Sounding Like Faulkner - You're Doing Pretty Good, But Your Life In Hoboken Isn't Faulkneresque. So You Get That Kind Of Shortfall Between The Actual Experience Of The Writer And The Things He's Hungry To Express And The Voice Itself.

It Seemed To Me, In Some Way, Especially When You're Looking Back At Distant Historical Events, The "truth" With A Capital "t" Is Kind Of The Juxtaposition Of All The Many, Many, Many Truths That Seem True To People At The Time.

That For Me Was The Big Turning Point In My Artistic Life, When My Wife And I Had Our Kids. The World Got Infused With Morality Again. Every Person In The World Should Theoretically Be Loved As Much As I Love My Daughters.

You Can Say You're A Liberal And Everybody Laughs And It's A Good Time.

The Other Thing That's Useful For Me Is This Notion Of The Absolute Versus The Relative:if We Walk Out And It's A Beautiful Morning, It's Only A Beautiful Morning Because We Don't Have A Broken Leg Or Hemorrhoids Or Something.

As For "toothy Kindness" - I Think All Traditions Are Full Of This Sort Of Tough Kindness. If Someone Is On A Wrong Or Dull Path, And Someone Else Startles Them Into Awareness Of That, Then That's A Blessing. And The Method By Which The Startle Is Obtained Might Be Anger, Or Satire, Or An Intentionally Applied Indifference. But That Is, Of Course, A Fine Line.

Stay Alert. The Big Moral Crossroads In Your Life May Not Come Labeled As Such.

I'm Comfortable With Anything After The Fact.

I Feel Nervous Because I Revere [zadie Smith] So Much. I Don't Want To Be Stupid. If I Say Something Stupid, Just Interrupt Me.

I Read To Make Myself Feel Awake.

The Way I Understood Purgatory - And Maybe You've Got A Different Version - But In Chicago In The '70s, The Idea Was It Was Like Detention. You Had Screwed Up And You Go Over There In Purgatory And You Sit There Until The End Of Days And Then We'll Decide. You'd Made Your Mistake, And You Were In Prison, And It's Not Terrible And It's Not Great, And You Feel A Little Crappy Because You Were Not In The Presence Of God.

The End Of The Day

At Times, They're So Right And I'm So Left, We Agree.

It Seems To Me A Worthy Goal: Try To Create A Representation Of Consciousness That's Durable And Truthful, I.e., That Accounts, Somewhat, For All The Strange, Tiny, Hard-to-articulate, Instantaneous, Unwilled Things That Actually Go On In Our Minds In The Course Of A Given Day, Or Even A Given Moment.

I've Had That Situation Where I Start Writing Somebody Really Miserable, And In Order To Make The Story Come Alive, I Have To Give Them A Vote Of Confidence, Make Him Vulnerable Or Wounded. But In Real Life, You Often Meet People Who, In That Particular Moment, Actually Shouldn't Get A Vote Of Confidence.

I'm Finding, As I Get Older, That I'm Not Much Of A Believer In Redemption. I Mean, I Believe In Redemption In Real Life - Redemption Does Happen, And It's Cool When It Does - But I Find Myself Getting Leery Of My Desire For It In Stories (especially My Own).

Realism Is To Fiction What Gravity Is To Walking: A Confinement That Allows Dancing Under The Right Circumstances.

From Across The Woods, As If By Common Accord, Birds Left Their Trees And Darted Upward. I Joined Them, Flew Amount Them, They Did Not Recognize Me As Something Apart From Them, And I Was Happy, So Happy, Because For The First Time In Years, And Forevermore, I Had Not Killed, And Never Would.

I'm Repledging Myself To Human-scale Values. As A Fiction Writer, The Best Data Comes Through The Senses And Is Then Processed Through Many Revisions. We Have To Learn To Be Intelligent Assessors Of The Data Coming In To Us And What It's Doing To Our Mental Process.

It's Funny With Fiction - Once You Cut Something, It Hasn't Happened Anymore.

On A More Technical Level, A Story Takes A Lot Of Words. And To Generate Words And Phrases And Images And So On, That Will Compel The Reader To Continue Reading - That Stand A Chance Of Really Grabbing A Reader - The Writer Has To Work Out Of A Place Of, Let's Say, Familiarity And Affection. The Matrix Of The Story Has To Be Made Out Of Stuff The Writer Really Knows About And Likes. The Writer Can't Be Stretching And (purely) Inventing All The Time. Well, I Can't, Anyway.

The Number Of Rooms In A Fictional House Should Be Inversely Proportional To The Years During Which The Couple Living In That House Enjoyed True Happiness.

Maybe You Could Even Think 100,000 People Are Inside Each Human Being. And You Drop A Novel On That Person, And A Certain Number Of Those Sub-people Come Alive Or Get Reenergized For Some Finite Time.

Some Of Our Writers Are Starting To Incorporate Elements Of Social Media, Etc. In The Work Itself, Which Is All For The Good, I Think - Finding New Ways Of Being Poetic.

I Find That The Great Artists I've Met Are People Who Are So Playfully Invested In Their Process That, Even If It Doesn't Come Out The Way They Like, They Still Power Through And Even Take Energy From It.

It Seems To Me That There Are Certain Thoughts And Vignettes And Attitudes That I Have Always Had The Desire To Represent.

My Heartfelt Wish For You: As You Get Older, Your Self Will Diminish And You Will Grow In Love.

It's A Big World, And I Really Like It.

A John Updike Is A Once-in-a-generation Phenomenon, If That Generation Is Lucky: So Comfortable In So Many Genres, The Same Lively, Generous Intelligence Suffusing All He Did.

The Story Sometimes Writes You Into A Corner.

One Of The Things I Noticed About The Trump Supporters Was A Lot Of Projected Fear. I Can't Tell You How Many Times A Conversation Went Like This: "we've Got To Stop These Immigrants, Because It's Terrible." I'd Say, "okay, What Personally Have You Observed About This?" And There Would Be Basically Nothing In That Box. And I'd Say, "where'd You Get Your Information?" Thinking They Were Going To Say Fox. But They Would Always Say, "well, I Get My Information From All Kinds Of Sources." Fox Is Kind Of Center-left To A Lot Of People Now.

When I Write I Know That I'm Going To Have To Produce 40 Percent More Than I Need.

Do Not Really Like Rich People, As They Make Us Poor People Feel Dopey And Inadequate. Not That We Are Poor. I Would Say We Are Middle. We Are Very, Very Lucky. I Know That. But Still, It Is Not Right That Rich People Make Us Middle People Feel Dopey And Inadequate.

I See This Quality [real Interest And Joy] In The Work Of [pavel] Chekhov, Of Course, And [alexei] Tolstoy And Really Just About Any Great Writer.

What I Regret Most In My Life Are Failures Of Kindness. Those Moments When Another Human Being Was There, In Front Of Me, Suffering, And I Responded . . . Sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

It Was Like Either: (a) I Was A Terrible Guy Who Was Knowingly Doing This Rotten Thing Over And Over, Or (b) It Wasn’t So Rotten, Really, Just Normal, And The Way To Confirm It Was Normal Was To Keep Doing It, Over And Over.

In The Moment Of Reading, The Writer Comes Up To The Surface And The Reader Comes Up To The Surface And They Kiss, Like Two Fish. That Actually Does Happen.

I Hear That In My Head All The Time Now: 'why Don't You Go And See?'.

I Don't Know About Transformation. But Scientifically You Can Say: Well, It Doesn't Seem To Hurt Anybody. Personally I've Been Cheered By Books At Really Critical Moments. That Much I Believe.

When You Do Something That's Going To Speak To People, It's Going To Be Because You're Really Allowing All Of Yourself To The Table In An Accepting Way.

I Love Story-writing Because I Can (more Or Less, On Occasion) Actually Do It. That's Really The Truth. I Like The Idea That A Story Is Sort Of A Site For Making Cool Language Effects - A Site For Celebrating Language, And, Therefore, The World. And The Brevity Is Part Of The Challenge. I Like Stories Because I Get Them - I Know How To Make Beauty, Or Something Like Beauty, In That Mode.

I'm Always Aware Of Writing Around Things I Can't Do, And I've Come To Think That That's Actually What 'style' Is - An Avoidance Of Your Deficiencies.

If You Really Think Back To The Great Writers, There's A Lot Of Happiness In Tolstoy; There's A Lot Of Love, There's Childbirth, And There's Dances. And Likewise In Shakespeare And Even Cervantes, There's A Lot Of Celebrations Of The Positive Manifestations Of Life. Technically, I Found It Harder To Do, So That's Kind Of A Good Late-life Challenge - Without Getting Sentimental Or Chirpy.

...smile First, Then Speak.

I Think Even Like Saddam Hussein Or Hitler Would Wake Up And Say, "i Think It's Going To Be A Good Day. I'm Gonna Do Some Really Important Work." And Given Their Definition Of Good, They Went Out And Did Horrible Things.

Why Were We Put Here, So Inclined To Love, When End Of Our Story = Death? That Harsh. That Cruel. Do Not Like.

One Lesson I Learned The Hard Way, Early In My Career, Was That If I Tried To Write To Be Smart Or To Convey A Theme Or From Some Existing Plan, The Result Was Usually Pretty Boring. My Intuitive Move, Whenever I'm Considering Writing Something, Is To Steer Towards What Feels Enjoyable. Another Way Of Saying It Is, You Just Try To Avoid The "sucky." If You Start To Think Of A Story And A Way To Tell It, And Your Reaction Is Kind Of Like, Ugh, That's Going To Be Hard, Then You Don't Want To Do That.

The Only Thing I Might Have Noticed [and This Is Pretty Anecdotal] Is That There Is Some Tendency To Need To Be Taught That 'writing Is Rewriting' - Maybe More Of A Sense Than Was Pervasive 10 Years Ago That The First Or Second Pass Of A Story Is Sufficient. That Is An Idea That Is Easily Dislodged, But I Suspect It Might Have Something To Do With The Turnaround Time Re: Blogging And So On - This Sense That There Is Some Essential Truth About A First Draft That One Runs The Risk Of "ruining" By Coming Back To It.

This - Where We Are Now - Is Where A Culture Gets To, When It Has Chosen, For Many Years, Banality Over Intelligence, The Literal Over The Immaterial Or Complex, Materialism Over Spirituality. This Is The Result Of Many Years Of Disrespecting The Intellectual Project - Of A Collective Acceptance Of The Idea That Thinking And Reasoning And Reading Deeply In Difficult Text And Being Respectful Of History Are Somehow "wimpy" Or Secondary.

The Artist's Job, I Think, Is To Be A Conduit For Mystery. To Intuit It, And Recognize That The Story-germ Has Some Inherent Mystery In It, And Sort Of Midwife That Mystery Into The Story In Such A Way That It Isn't Damaged In The Process, And May Even Get Heightened Or Refined.

I Think We Need Leadership That Can Gently And With Affection Remind Us Of What We Americans Mostly Agree Upon: Civility, Kindness, Tolerance, Humour, Et Cetera. The Current Trump Administration Seems To Thrive On Trying To Enforce A Very Odd, Fearful Agenda, That It Tries To Disguise In A False Garment Of Fondness For The Working-class - Despite The Fact That Its Policies Seem Designed To Continue The Decades-long Habit Of Marginalizing That Group.

Now I Began To Understand Art As A Kind Of Black Box The Reader Enters. He Enters In One State Of Mind And Exits In Another. The Writer Gets No Points Just Because What's Inside The Box Bears Some Linear Resemblance To "real Life" -- He Can Put Whatever He Wants In There. What's Important Is That Something Undeniable And Nontrivial Happens To The Reader Between Entry And Exit.

The Idea Is That What An Artist Lives Through Should Broaden His Notion Of What It Is Possible For A Human Being To Live Through, And That New Understanding Should Then Get Into And Expand The Work.

Fiction Is Open To Whoever Comes In The Door, As Long As You Come In Energetically.

Art Is Not Some Inessential Frippery - It Is The Nation's Means Of Intelligently Regarding Itself. To Cripple Or Stigmatize The Arts Is To Doom One's Nation To A Life Of Incuriosity, Dullness, Literalness And The Worst Kind Of Rank Materialism.

I Think That Feels Like It To Me. I Mean Whenever You Talk About Writing I Think You Have To Remember That It All Has A Big Question Mark Over It - Every Word Has A Big Question Mark Over It.

What Once Were Two, Are One

The Scariest Thought In The World Is That Someday I'll Wake Up And Realize I've Been Sleepwalking Through My Life: Underappreciating The People I Love, Making The Same Hurtful Mistakes Over And Over, A Slave To Neuroses, Fear, And The Habitual.

I'm A Big Lover Of America. I Love The People, But Also The Weird Berms, The Strange Little High Schools Tucked Away In Different Places, And Just The Whole Geography And The Psychological Apparatus Of Americans.

So Many People Mentioned This At These Rallies. You Go To These Things And It's Kind Of Like An Oldies Concert. I Mean, It's Not Hostile.

Humor Is What Happens When We're Told The Truth Quicker And More Directly Than We're Used To.

There Was One Sequence Of Days [making Lincoln In The Bardo] When I Had Halfway Decided To Use The Historical Nuggets, But I Wasn't Quite Sure It Would Work. I'd Be In My Room For Six Or Seven Hours, Cutting Up Bits Of Paper With Quotes And Arranging Them On The Floor, With This Little Voice In My Head Saying, "hey, This Isn't Writing!" But At The End Of That Day, I Felt That The Resulting Section Was Doing Important Emotional Work

I Believe That, When [meeting Of Writer And Reader] Happens And The Reader Goes Out Into The World The Next Day, There's Some Alteration That Might Possibly Inflect The Person Positively.

I Watched A Bunch Of Kids Movies On Christmas. I Was Kind Of Joking With Our Family By Asking, "is Anyone Allowed To Die In A Kid's Movie Anymore?"

I Think About How I Conceptualize The Audience. The Trick Is That They've Got To Be Smarter And More Worldly Than Me. So As I'm Revising, I'm Keeping That In Mind. I Cannot Condescend, Even A Little Bit. Every Single Choice That I Make Is Motivated By That.

[lincoln In The Bardo] Is Not A Long Book. And That Meant I Could Obsess Over It And Live In It Both Backwards And Forwards And Hyper-control Everything.

I Think That Fiction Has A Part To Play In Urging Us, As A Species, Toward Compassion.

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.

Honestly, The Choice Is: I Can Be A Cheerful Person, More Awake To Correction, More Of A Force For Good ... When I'm Writing. Or I Can Be The Opposite Of All Those Things, When I'm Not Writing.

The Bush Administration Is A Paragon Of Wisdom.

My Mind Goes Really Quickly And I Tend To Talk Really Fast, As You've Probably Heard, I Sometimes Lose Track Of My Syntax, As I'm Talking That Fast. The Only Thing I Try To Do, Well, It's Slow Down, But Also I Do Something When I'm Reading That's Similar To When I'm Writing A Section, Which Is To Really Try To Imagine You On The Other Side, In A Certain Way, As An Intelligent, Sympathetic Presence Who's Rooting For Me To Tell You A Good Story.

I'm Not Thinking In Any Big Thematic Or Conceptual Terms - Especially In This Book [lincoln In The Bardo] When I Was Trying To Make The Voices More Active, More Energetic.

In Fact Unrestrained Capitalism Is Quite Cruel And The Cost Is On The Individual Human, On His Or Her Grace.

As A Writer I'm Essentially Just Trying To Impersonate A First-time Reader, Who Picks Up The Story And Has To Decide, At Every Point, Whether To Keep Going.

So For Me The Approach Has Become To Go Into A Story Not Really Sure Of What I Want To Say, Try To Find Some Little Seed Crystal Of Interest, A Sentence Or An Image Or An Idea, And As Much As Possible Divest Myself Of Any Deep Ideas About It. And Then By This Process Of Revision, Mysteriously It Starts To Accrete Meanings As You Go.

Do Those Things That Incline You Toward The Big Questions, And Avoid The Things That Would Reduce You And Make You Trivial.

I've Also Found That Trying To Be Active With Social Media Changes My Moment-to-moment Perceptions. Instead Of Feeling, "what's The Deepest Version Of What's Happening Here?" I Start To Feel, "how Can I Use [or "claim"] This?".

My Mind Has An Obsessive, Neurotic Quality, But I Also Have A Very Hard Work Ethic. I Know That A Lot Of People Think, Oh, You Have A Wild Imagination. I Don't, Really. If Ten People Are Sitting Around And Someone Says, "hey Complete This Sentence In A Funny Way," I'm Never Ahead Of The Pack.

Wild Imagination

I Still Believe That Capitalism Is Too Harsh And I Believe That, Even Within That, There Is A Lot Of Satisfaction And Beauty If You Happen To Be One Of The Lucky Ones, Although That Doesn't Eradicate The Reality Of The Suffering. It's All True At Once, Kind Of Humming And Sublime.

The Great American Denial Riff Is That You Can Do Whatever You Like And You Always Triumph At The End. The World Is Saying No, You Can Do What You Like, But There Are Consequences. And Maturity Is To Be Able To Turn To The Consequences And Accept Them.

When We Talk About Adversity, This Is The Moment When Character Really Gets Tested. When Things Aren't Going The Way You Want And You Can't See Anyway That They're Going To Go The Way You Want. That's Kind Of When Those Old Virtues Really Become Valuable And Vulnerable Also.

I'm Turning 58, And You Get That Kind Of Weird, Old-guy Feeling Of You Don't Have An Infinite Number Of Years Left And If There's Anything You Want To Say Or Represent, It's Time To Try It.

All Of This Strife On The Political Front Might Just Be The Death Throes Of Another Set Of [less-honorable] American Beliefs, That Have, At Their Core, The Notion That Equality Is Something The Privileged Group "gives" To Those Not So Privileged - A Reaching Down, As It Were.

One Of The Principals Of Composition, I Would Say, In Fiction, Is You Want To Do What You Can Do A Lot Of. You Want To Do What You're Enthusiastic About And What Rings Your Bell. In This Case, Almost Every Decision I Made Was On That Basis.

I Wasted A Lot Of Years Working On My Writing And Very Grandly Saying, 'and Now... My Novel!,' Which Would Soon Be Reduced To A Short Story, Then To A Paragraph.

I Watched A Documentary About The Immigrant Crisis Around The World. And It Does Make Me Blush At All The Times I've Stood Up On The Stage And Given Your Speech About The Healing Power Of Fiction.

The Switch That I'd Like To Throw On Is The One That Says, "look, You're A Human Being Whose Mind Is Every Bit As Active As Anybody Else's. Your Experiences Are Just As Real." For That Matter, Even If They're Even If They're Crazy, They're Valid. They Occurred In This World So They're Valid Topics For Literature.

One Of The Sad Things About This Political Season Is That It Allows [requires] Us To Get Behind Our Big "liberal" Or "conservative" Banner And Forget, For A Time, That The Big Problems In Our Country Have Been Around A Long Time And Have Been Batted Back And Forth, Caused And Exacerbated, By Both Sides, And Are More Spiritual Or Ethical Than [merely] Political.

While Writing This Book [lincoln In The Bardo], [idea Of Inclusion] Occurred To Me, You Either Believe In The Constitution Or You Don't. If You Do, It's Intense In What It Wants Of Us.

There Might Be A Different Model For A Literary Community That's Quicker, More Real-time, And Involves More Spontaneity.

A Sort Of Fearlessness - The Notion That A Person Could Be Comfortable With (even Interested In) Whatever Arises. I Sure Can't Do It, But I Think All Of Us Have Had Little Glimpse Of That Power, Often When We Are Really Actively Loving Someone Or Something And Feel That Little Eradication Of Self That Happens When We Are Engaged In Feeling Protective Or Especially Fond Of Someone Else. I Associate That Feeling With A Corresponding Clarity Of Purpose And A Disappearance Of Confusion.

Clarity Of Purpose

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.

According To Me, Your Life Is Going To Be A Gradual Process Of Becoming Kinder And More Loving. Hurry Up. Speed It Along. Start Right Now.

I Say Yes To The Hot Bath And The Sandwich - To Getting Ourselves Into The Best Possible Mental Shape To Identify And Then Fight The Necessary Fights From The Best Possible Mind-state: Calm, Loving, Affectionate, Precise. Not Pushovers But Also Not Zealots. With The Idea In Mind That "our Enemies" Are Not Our Enemies; They Might Seem Like That In Their Present Form But That Form Can Morph. We Really Are Large, And Really Do Contain Multitudes. But I Think It All Has To Start With A Kindly Presence Of Mind, And The Aspiration To Affection For Others.

Presence Of Mind

Early On, A Story's Meaning And Rationale Seem Pretty Obvious, But Then, As I Write It, I Realize That I Know The Meaning/rationale Too Well, Which Means That The Reader Will Also Know It - And So Things Have To Be Ramped Up.

As A Young Kid I Assumed That Everybody Was Sort Of On The Same Wavelength As I Was And Then I Found Out In A Lot Of Small Ways That That Wasn't The Case. It's Sort Of A Mixed Blessing. My Mind Is Like A Puppy. It Goes All Over. I Guess Writing Fiction Was A Way Of Harnessing That. I Could Hook A Puppy Up To A Treadmill And Get Something Out Of It.

I Was A Big And Un-ironic Fan Of Dear Abby When I Was A Kid In Chicago. I Think I Sort Of Internalized Her. So I Have This Inner Abby: Cranky, Proper, Folksy Yet Scathing, With A Beehive Hairdo. But That's My Issue.

It's On Us To Investigate Ourselves For Any Lingering Sense That We Are 'giving' Equality. We Are Not. It Is Already Given. And Not By Us.

People Who've Written About Abraham Lincoln's Writing Emphasize How Logical He Was. His Writing Was A Syllogistic Tool. He Would Say, If A, Then B, And He Would Reason Through It. His Late Writing Especially Is So Tight And So Beautifully Reasoned.

You Don't Want To Be That Parent - The One Who Dresses His Kid In A Cloth Sack When All The Other Kids Are In Armani Cloth Sacks - Especially In A Time Like Ours, When Materialism Is Not Only Rampant And Ascendant But Is Fast Becoming The Only Game In Town.

"kindness" Can Mean A Lot Of Different Things. In This Case, I Felt I Had To Present His [donald Trump's] Supporters In As Fair A Light As Possible - Many Of Them Hadn't Been Interviewed Before And That Entailed Some Interviewer-courtesy In The Editing And So On.

I Have Been Married To My Wife, Paula, For 25 Years. We Have Wonderful Kids. Things Are - It's Been A Really Rich Life, So I Started Thinking, Is There A Way To Get Valence A Little More Into The Stories, The Idea That, Yes, Things Can Go Wrong, But Also They Can Go Right.

I Grew Up In Chicago On The South Side, And Had A Ton Of Freedom, Just Did Whatever I Wanted, Whenever I Wanted. At The Risk Of Sounding Dopey, I Would Say It Was Blissful.

As The Writer Of This Book [lincoln In The Bardo], What I Loved Was The Feeling Of Having So Many Surprises Come At The End That I Hadn't Really Planned Or Planted.

All I Really Know In Nonfiction Is That When I Come Home, I've Got All These Notes And I'm Trying To Figure Out What Actually Happened To Me. I Usually Kind Of Know What Happened, But As You Work Through The Notes, You Find That Certain Scenes Write Well And Some Don't Even Though They Should. Those Make A Constellation Of Meaning That Weirdly Ends Up Telling You What You Just Went Through. It's A Slightly Different Process, But Still There's Mystery Because When You're Bearing Down On The Scenes, Sometimes You Find Out They Mean Something Different Than What You Thought.

When Something Really Bad Is Going On In A Culture, The Average Guy Doesn't See It. He Can't. He's Average And Is Surrounded By And Immersed In The Cant And Discourse Of The Status Quo.

I Guess What I'm Trying To Say Is That Whatever Weirdness Was Going To Be In There, I Felt, Had To Be Earned. And It Had To Be Required By The Emotional Needs Of The Book.

I Have Nothing. My Model Is I Have Nothing Figured Out, And I'm Starting With Some Little Nugget And Hoping That It Will Talk Back To Me Enough To Let It Grow.

If You Have A Friend, What's The Best Way You Can Experience Her Beauty? It's To Really Accept Her. She's Weird In This Way, I Accept It. She's Hard To Talk To, I Accept It. Then That Person Eventually Will Come All The Way Out Into The Sun. I Think It's The Same Way With Our Talent. We Say, "look, I'm Not Going To Judge You. I'm Going To Try To Use You In The Very Best Way."

My View Is That Our Minds Are Incredibly Powerful Animals That Are, During Life, Kept Somewhat In Check By The Load Of Our Bodies. Once That Load Is Gone (or So Some Ancient Texts Teach Us) The Mind Is Like A Horse Off The Tether. So The Habits We Get Into Here Might Have Something To Do With What Happens To Us Afterwards. An Exciting But Harrowing Idea, Given The Everyday State Of My Mind. But Also Hopeful, Since That's Something A Person Can Work With.

My Idea About Collections Is That You Write As Hard As You Can For Some Period And What You're Really Doing During That Time Is Hyper-focusing On The Individual Pieces - Trying To Make Each One Sit Up And Really Do Some Surprising Work.

Monologues, In Some Ways, Are The Most Scientific Descriptions Of Consciousness And Even Of Gatherings.

Life Is Short, Very Short, And What Are We Doing Here If Not Trying To Become More Generous And Loving?

The Best Thing We Can Bring To Any Fight Is A Calm And Compassionate Mind.

For Me, Things Were Either Very Sullied Or Very Pure, Very Controlled Or Very Under-controlled.

With Nonfiction, I Go In Trying To Be Really Honest About What My Preconceptions Are.

I Think The Trick Of Being A Writer Is To Basically Put Your Cards Out There All The Time And Be Willing To Be As In The Dark About What Happens Next As Your Reader Would Be At That Time. And Then You Can Really Surprise Yourself. There's That Cliche, "no Surprise For The Writer, No Surprise For The Reader!"

I Had To Go In And Do The Work Of Toning [invented "historical" Bits] Down In Order To Make Them Fit [in Lincoln In The Bardo]. It's Like If You're An Actor And You're Always Overacting, Well, You're A Bad Actor. But If You're An Actor Who Subdues Yourself To The Extent That's Necessary, Then You're Really Acting.

I Actually Believe That A Lot Of What People Call Originality Has To Do With Persistence In The Craft.

In Art, And Maybe Just In General, The Idea Is To Be Able To Be Really Comfortable With Contradictory Ideas. In Other Words, Wisdom Might Be, Seem To Be, Two Contradictory Ideas Both Expressed At Their Highest Level And Just Let To Sit In The Same Cage Sort Of, Vibrating. So, I Think As A Writer, I'm Really Never Sure Of What I Really Believe.

I Don't Feel Like I Have The Intelligence To Really Inhabit A Consistently High Level Of Prose.

Our First Responsibility In All Things Is To Preserve Our Goodness Of Heart - Then And Only Then Act.

The Old And Honorable American Notion, That A Person Who Works Hard Should Be Able To Live In Freedom And Security, With Dignity - Seems To Have Taken On A Secondary Status.

If You Want To Explore A Political Idea In The Highest Possible Way, You Embody It In The Personal, Because That's Something That No One Can Deny.

Chekhov - Shall I Be Blunt? - Is The Greatest Short Story Writer Who Ever Lived.

Writing And Reading And Speaking With Specificity And Skill Has Never Seen More Important To Me Than It Does At This Moment. It's What's Between Us And Chaos.

I Know This Will Sound Naïve, But I Often Wonder What America Would Be Like If Our National Ethos Was Simply To Minimize Suffering. Period. To Try, Every Day, To Convert Our Wonderful Wealth And National Energy Into The Cessation Of Suffering Wherever We Find It. Imagine If That Was Our National Mindset. Well, We Can-we Must-dream.

As One Gets Older, This Question Of Death, Becomes More Vexing And Urgent.

So, Good News/bad News: Good News That I'm Progressing; Bad News That Life Is Short And Art Is Long.

I Think Something That I Can't Name About Our Media Has Made Us Move Away From That Kind Of Specificity And That Kind Of Curiosity.

When I Wrote That [donald] Trump Piece, I Had This Uncomfortable Experience Of Sensing A Lot Of Things That Were Nascent, That I Couldn't Quite Articulate. And One Of Them Was This Move Toward Anti-intellectualism. An Anti-love Move, Even.

I Do Find The Values In A Christmas Carol Significant. It Is Important Not To Be Mean And Stingy And Not To Give Up Love For Money.

Intelligent, Heartfelt Stories That Tell A Whole New Set Of Truths About Growing Up American. Julie Orringer Writes With Virtuosity And Depth About The Fears, Cruelties, And Humiliations Of Childhood, But Then Does That Rarest, And More Difficult, Thing: Writes Equally Beautifully About The Moments Of Victory And Transcendence.

I Think It Is Time For A New Pride In The Intellectual Life, And A New Impatience With People Who Take Pride In Ignorance, Or Somehow Use "elite" To Mean "person Who Has Taken The Time To Know" And Then Are Eager To Dismiss, Say, Striving, Or The Notion That Improving One's Self Out Of Difficult Conditions Is A Noble Thing.

It Blew My Mind, Reading Swing Time, That I Could Take Any Sentence In The Book, And It Was One Of The Most Beautiful Sentences Written In English.

If I Find Myself Being Too Earnest And Sentimental And Hyperbolic And Simplistic, Which Is Definitely A Tendency I Have, Then I Bring In This Perverse Henchman.

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