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Even If Something Within Me Is Ugly, Writing Is A Pretty Good Place To Play With That Thing And To Begin To Really See It.
-George Saunders
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Even If Something Within

George Saunders
...
Even If Something Within Me Is Ugly, Writing Is A Pretty Good Place To Play With That Thing And To Begin To Really See It.

Understanding the Quote: "even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good..."

This quote by George Saunders reflects deeply on the theme of writing. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Writing, Play, Ugly, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how George Saunders interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About George Saunders

George Saunders is celebrated for insightful thoughts on writing and play. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Writing
Play
Ugly
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You Can See A Whole Book As A Series Of Creating An Expectation And Then Delivering A Skew On That Expectation So It's Not Totally Satisfied.
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The Best Thing We Can Bring To Any Fight Is A Calm And Compassionate Mind.
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Whole Swaths Of The Book [lincoln In The Bardo] Are Made Up Of Verbatim Quotes From Various Historical Sources, Which I Cut Up And Rearranged To Form Part Of The Narrative.
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Anyone Can Be Shamed, But Feeling Guilt Requires Empathy Within.
Empathy
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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.
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The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me Is That Nothing Happened In Writing. I Ended Up Working For Engineering Companies, And That's Where I Found My Material, In The Everyday Struggle Between Capitalism And Grace. Being Broke And Tired, You Don't Come Home Your Best Self.
Struggle
Writing
Tired
I Think It Was A Big Revelation To Me Earlier In My Life That People Who Appear To Be Evil Are Actually Not. In Other Words, Nobody Wakes Up In The Morning And Says, "yuck, Yuck, Yuck, I'm Gonna Be Evil."
Morning
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People
Whether You're Eighteen Or Sixty, In A Certain Way, Whatever You Know Is Valid.
Way
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My General Approach To Writing Fiction Is That You Try To Have As Few Conceptual Notions As Possible And You Just Respond To The Energy That The Story Is Making Rather Than Having A Big Over Plan. I Think If You Have A Big Over Plan, The Danger Is That You Might Just Take Your Plan And Then You Bore Everybody. I Always Joke That It's Like Going On A Date With Index Cards. You Know, At 7:30 P.m. I Should Ask About Her Mother. You Keep All The Control To Yourself But You Are Kind Of Insulting To The Other Person.
Mother
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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."
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I Like [barak] Obama. I Like Him. So How Far Does Rationality Help To Persuade Anybody? You Know, I'm Not So Sure.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Character
Thinking
Trying
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.
Jobs
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Even If Something Within Me Is Ugly, Writing Is A Pretty Good Place To Play With That Thing And To Begin To Really See It.
Writing
Play
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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.
Writing
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With Nonfiction, I Go In Trying To Be Really Honest About What My Preconceptions Are.
Trying
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When You're Embarking On A Piece Of Writing, The Anxiety Is Just Too Much, Especially When You're Young And You're Trying To Figure Out If This Is Your Thing Or Not. You Feel Like, "if I Don't Write A Good Story, I Gotta Get Going To Law School!"
Writing
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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.
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I'm Fascinated With Actors, And I've Never Quite Understood The Process.
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Suddenly Absurdism Wasn’t An Intellectual Abstraction, It Was Actually Realism. You Could See The Way That Wealth Was Begetting Wealth, Wealth Was Begetting Comfort — And That The Cumulative Effect Of An Absence Of Wealth Was The Erosion Of Grace.
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When I Was A Kid, I Took 'the Brady Bunch' And 'the Partridge Family' Very Seriously. It Was A World To Me In The Same Way That The Greek Myths Would Have Been Had I Read Them. You Know, Marcia Is Athena And Mr. Brady Is Zeus.
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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.
Kids
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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.
Reading
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I Have Finally Realized That, You Know, It's Not A Given That My Lifespan Will Accommodate My Writing Aspirations.
Writing
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So Here's Something I Know To Be True, Although It's A Little Corny, And I Don't Quite Know What To Do With It.
Advice
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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.
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There Were Several Points Where I Would Kind Of Turn To The Book And Say, "get Thee Behind Me." I Don't Think Real Novelists Do That. But I Make A Distinction Between Prose That's Very Efficiency-minded (like, The Minimum I Can Get Away With), Versus Loosening The Screws And Letting The Words Spill Out Beautifully And So On.
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I'm Such A Baby If I Even Get A Flu.
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I Haven't Written A Novel Or Something That Long, Because I Really Am Improvising All Along And The Story Is Growing New Limbs To Do What It Needs To Do. So There's Very Little Planning. There's A Little Planning Where I Say, "well, It Looks Like I'm Going In This Direction, Ok, Good." But There's Very Little Forethought Or Intellectual Justification: "oh, Look, I'm Putting In A Theme Park Because That Represents Dystopian America!"
America
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I Have A Sense That God Is Unfair And Preferentially Punishes His Weak, His Dumb, His Fat, His Lazy. I Believe He Takes More Pleasure In His Perfect Creatures, And Cheers Them On Like A Brainless Dad As They Run Roughshod Over The Rest Of Us. He Gives Us A Need For Love, And No Way To Get Any. He Gives Us A Desire To Be Liked, And Personal Attributes That Make Us Utterly Unlikable. Having Placed His Flawed And Needy Children In A World Of Exacting Specifications, He Deducts The Difference Between What We Have And What We Need From Our Hearts And Our Self-esteem And Our Mental Health.
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Do All The Other Things, The Ambitious Things - Travel, Get Rich, Get Famous, Innovate, Lead, Fall In Love, Make And Lose Fortunes...but As You Do, To The Extent That You Can, Err In The Direction Of Kindness.
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I Don't Mind Being Criticized Intelligently; Although I Don't Love It.
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What's Really Baffling To Me Is The Way That The Technology Has Risen Up To Help Us Become More Materialistic.
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So I May Not Have Had A Gothic Childhood, But Childhood Makes Its Own Gothicity.
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Certainly We're Always Rooting For Our Particular Contingent Moment To Be A Great One. Pain-free. But The More Expansive Vision Has To Include The Idea That, Even For Us, Sometimes Our Particular Contingent Moment Is Going To Be Horrific.
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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.
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As A Kid, I Had A Real Fascination With Perverse, Off-color, And Kind Of Risky Things, And I Also Had A Very Sanctimonious Catholic, Purist Side.
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Night Was Falling. Birds Were Singing. Birds Were, It Occurred To Me To Say, Enacting A Frantic Celebration Of Day's End. They Were Manifesting As The Earth's Bright-colored Nerve Endings, The Sun's Descent Urging Them Into Activity, Filling Them Individually With Life Nectar, The Life Nectar Then Being Passed Into The World, Out Of Each Beak, In The Form Of That Bird's Distinctive Song, Which Was, In Turn, An Accident Of Beak Shape, Throat Shape, Breast Configuration, Brain Chemistry: Some Birds Blessed In Voice, Others Cursed; Some Squeaking, Others Rapturous.
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I Understand What Something Short Should Be Like. I Understand Beauty In That Form. If I Start Extending, Somehow I Kind Of Lose My Bearings.
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There Might Be A Different Model For A Literary Community That's Quicker, More Real-time, And Involves More Spontaneity.
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I Sometimes Think That I Can't Do The Bigger Thing That [zadie Smith] Do So Beautifully, As In Swing Time, With So Much World In It And So Much Rapturous Paint Thrown Around. I Don't Think It Would Be Possible To Write A Book On That Scale With As Much Ocd As I Have.
Book
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I Tend To Foster Drama Via Bleakness. If I Want The Reader To Feel Sympathy For A Character, I Cleave The Character In Half, On His Birthday. And Then It Starts Raining. And He's Made Of Sugar.
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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.
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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."
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That Luminous Part Of You That Exists Beyond Personality - Your Soul, If You Will - Is As Bright And Shining As Any That Has Ever Been. Bright As Shakespeare’s, Bright As Gandhi’s, Bright As Mother Theresa’s. Clear Away Everything That Keeps You Separate From This Secret Luminous Place. Believe It Exists, Come To Know It Better, Nurture It, Share Its Fruits Tirelessly.
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Writing A Story I Am Just Trying To Find Some Little Interesting Thing To Start Out With: Something Small, Even Trivial. Preferably Something That Doesn't Have A Lot Of Thematic Or Political Baggage - A Little Crumb That Is Interesting.
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I Think That Fiction Has A Part To Play In Urging Us, As A Species, Toward Compassion.
Thinking
Compassion
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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.
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My Heartfelt Wish For You: As You Get Older, Your Self Will Diminish And You Will Grow In Love.
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Wish
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.
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Believe
Thinking
The Most Hopeful Thing In The Stories, I Hope, Is Wit. I Make It Up. If I Make Up A World In Which We're Ruled By Big Talking Turds, It Doesn't Mean That We Are. So You Shouldn't Feel Depressed.
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Hopeful
This Whole Literary Game Of Trying To Put Yourself In The Shoes Of Your Opponent Is Good For Everybody. It Leaves You More Open-hearted, It Gives You A More Accurate Vision Of The Other Person, Because It's More Based On Curiosity Than Projection. In The End If You Do Have To Fight, You're Better Equipped To Fight. Also It Doesn't Leave You Damaged At The End, It Doesn't Leave You Hateful Or Malformed By Your Own Anger.
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Shoes
Monologues, In Some Ways, Are The Most Scientific Descriptions Of Consciousness And Even Of Gatherings.
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I Don't Really Write Beautifully Naturally, Unlike Some People.
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People
Even The Written History [of Abraham Lincoln's Times] Is Poorly Understood By Most People.
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Abraham
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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.
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I Am Trying To Remember That Things Have Certainly Been Crazier In Human History And They May Get Crazier Here And Now, And [here I Am Trying To Be Optimistic] It's Even A Good Thing, To Be Going Through All Of This, If Only To Be Reminded That History Hasn't Stopped - Human Existence Is As Fundamentally Unmanageable Now As It Ever Was.
Optimistic
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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.
Writing
Night
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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.
Smart
Moving
Writing
Humor Is What Happens When We're Told The Truth Quicker And More Directly Than We're Used To.
Writing
Used
Happens
In My Work, And In My Psyche, There's Some Very Sentimental, Traditional, Conventional Side That's Always In Argument With A More Radical, Sarcastic Side. Some Of My Stories Are Really Sentimental, But They're Layered Over With Weird, Satirical Stuff.
Sarcastic
Stuff
Sides
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.
Jobs
Stuff
Young Writers
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.
Believe
Next Day
World
The Demographics Are Changing - And So What? Citizenship Is A Question Of Certain Agreed-upon Values And That Is That. Do We Believe That? I Think At Heart We Do.
Believe
Heart
Thinking
...smile First, Then Speak.
Firsts
Speak
I Had An Experience A Few Years Ago Where I Was On A Plane In Which One Of The Engines Went Out. I Couldn't Even Remember My Name. I Was Just Repeating The Word No Over And Over.
Years
Names
Remember
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.
Taken
Ignorance
Mean
What I Regret Most In My Life Are Failures Of Kindness.
Kindness
Regret
Advice
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.
Thinking
Self
Clarity Of Purpose
If I Go To The Coffee Shop And Have A Nice Interaction With The Barista, I Don't Know What That Does For World Peace, But We Have To Assume That In The Great Basket Of Goodness Maybe That's One Little Micron Or One Little Neutron That You've Put In There.
Nice
Coffee
Littles
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.
Dream
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Kids
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.
Stupid
Want
Nervous
...there Is No End To The Making And Selling Of Things There Is No End To The Making And Selling Of Things There Is No End... Man, It Occurs To Me, Is A Joyful, Buying-and-selling Piece Of Work. I Have Been Wrong, Dead Wrong, When I've Decried Consumerism. Consumerism Is What We Are. It Is, In A Sense, A Holy Impulse. A Human Being Is Someone Who Joyfully Goes In Pursuit Of Things, Brings Them Home, Then Immediately Starts Planning How To Get More.
Home
Men
Pieces
I Guess: People Who Are Comfortable Enough With Reality To Allow Other Sorts Of Realities And Other Mindsets To Just Be, And Then To Regard These With Real Interest And Joy [and The Joy Appears In The Prose Quality Itself].
Real
People
Joy
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.
People
Historical
Kind
When You're Out There In America, Meeting With Regular People, It's A Pretty Mellow, Relaxed, Kind-hearted Country. The Direction From The Top, From The President, Is Following Mean-spirited Tendencies: Fear And Undue Caution And Distrust Of The Other, So It's Very Depressing.
Country
Depressing
Mean
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.
Beautiful
Morning
Broken
The Cool Parts - The Parts That Have Won Dubai Its Reputation As 'the Vegas Of The Middle East' Or 'the Venice Of The Middle East' Or 'the Disney World Of The Middle East, If Disney World Were The Size Of San Francisco And Out In A Desert' - Have Been Built In The Last Ten Years.
Dubai
Years
San Francisco
Of Course There's Objective Truth, But When We're Looking At People's Accounts Of It, It Seems The Real Truth Lies In The Accretion Of All These Different Versions.
Real
Lying
Different
A Writer Writes What Interests Him And What He Can Manage, And What He Can Make Live, As Flannery O'connor Said. So My Reaction To Someone Saying "you Must!" Or "you Should!" Or Even "hey, Why Don't You?" Is Basically To Sort Of Shrug And Politely Walk Off And Do Whatever I Want To Do. It's Nobody Else's Business, Really, And Even If I Happened To Agree With One Of Those "musts" Or "shoulds" What Would I Do About It, If My Heart Wasn't In It?
Writing
Heart
Hey
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.
Reading
Acceptance
Thinking
I've Noticed That Nowadays I'm Doing A Lot Of Stuff On The Phone And On The Computer, Which I Usually Wouldn't Do Earlier. And I Can Feel My Brain Being Rewired: I'm Getting Anxious, I'm Getting More Manic. Now, I'm An Extreme Case Because I'm Old And I'm Overdoing It. But Still, It's Really Interesting That I Can Actually Feel A Change In My Neurochemistry From This Interaction With The Technology.
Technology
Phones
Interesting
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.
Guy
Rotten
Way
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.
Believe
Reality
Sublime
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.
Kindness
Blessing
Thinking
Character Is That Sum Total Of Moments We Can't Explain.
Character
Moments
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.
Maturity
Triumph
Denial
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.
Kids
Thinking
Years
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.
Art
Intelligent
Games
I Think In Our Time, You Know, So Much Of The Information We Get Is Pre-polarized. Fiction Has A Way Of Reminding Us That We Actually Are Very Similar In Our Emotions And Our Neurology And Our Desires And Our Fears, So I Think It's A Nice Way To Neutralize That Polarization.
Nice
Thinking
Desire
The Generalizing Writer Is Like The Passionate Drunk, Stumbling Into Your House Mumbling: I Know I'm Not Being Clear, Exactly, But Don't You Kind Of Feel What I'm Feeling?
Drunk
House
Feelings
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.
Moving
Thinking
Names
I've Found That My First Drafts Are Not So Special. But The More I Work On Them, The Better They Get. They Are More Unique And Defensible.
Unique
Special
Firsts
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.
Average
Guy
Culture
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.
Thinking
Choices
Mind
I've Had That My Whole Career. People Were Always Hedging Around The Question Of: Why Are You So Dark? What Happened To You?
Dark
Careers
People
You Go To The Marketplace And There Are Seventeen Consciousnesses Moving In And Out. Sometimes You Want The Same Shirt That I Want, And Our Thought Bubbles Collide A Bit And That Makes Plot.
Moving
Plot
Want
It's So Ironic That You Often Hear These Right-wing People Talking About The Constitution.
Talking
Wings
People
A Hip-looking Teen Watches An Elderly Woman Hobble Across The Street On A Walker. "grammy's Here!" He Shouts. He Puts Some Macattack Mac&cheese In The Microwave And Dons Headphones And Takes Out A Video Game So He Won't Be Bored During The Forty Seconds It Takes His Lunch To Cook. A Truck Comes Around The Corner And Hits Grammy, Sending Her Flying Over The Roof Into The Backyard, Where Luckily She Lands On A Trampoline. Unluckily, She Bounces Back Over The Roof, Into The Front Yard, Landing On A Rosebush.
Elderly
Land
Games
Stay Alert. The Big Moral Crossroads In Your Life May Not Come Labeled As Such.
May
Moral
Crossroads
I'm A Liberal And I'm Left Of Gandhi And I Don't Like Trump.
Trump
Left
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?".
Media
Feelings
Perception
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.
Jobs
Thinking
Engineering
I Think It Was A Big Revelation To Me Earlier In My Life That People Who Appear To Be Evil Are Actually Not. In Other Words, Nobody Wakes Up In The Morning And Says, "yuck, Yuck, Yuck, I'm Gonna Be Evil." 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.
Morning
Good Day
Thinking
I'm Not A Natural Criticizer - I Prefer To Like And Praise And So On.
Praise
Natural
As Flannery O'connor Says, A Person Can Choose What She Writes But She Can't Choose What She Makes Live. Some People Are Really Acoustic Writers And So For Them The Secret Revision Is Sound. Other People May Revise In Terms Of The Way A Paragraph Feels. There's A Million Ways To Do It.
Writing
People
Secret
The Millions Or Billions Of Micro Decisions That You're Going To Make, That's What Will Determine Who You Are As A Writer, Not You Deciding In Advance.
Decision
Billions
Determine
When I Think About What Fiction Does Morally, I'm Happier Thinking Of A Person Full Of Multiplicities - Sort Of Fragmented.
Thinking
Doe
Fiction
We've Got A Real Problem With Social Media That We Didn't Know We Were Going To Have. It's Almost Like The Demons Have Gotten Out Of The Box.
Real
Media
Problem
There's This De Facto Assumption That For Something To Have Value, It Has To Be Economically Self-supporting - Which Imposes A Very Low Ceiling On A Culture.
Self
Ceilings
Culture
I Would Say One Thing Writing This Book [lincoln In The Bardo] Did For Me Was Underscore The Fact That This Issue [all Men Are Created Equal] Has Never Been Properly Addressed And It Hasn't Gone Away.
Book
Writing
Men
When You Write An Essay, Of Course You're Going To Get Pushback, But You're Going To Be Allowed To Make Your Case At Leisure. You're Going To Be Allowed To Take Into Account Possible Objections And To Fully Humanize Your Reader. That Feels To Me Like A Much More Sane Thing To Do.
Writing
Leisure
Cases
The Writer, In Order To Proceed, Is Theoretically Trying To Predict Where His Complex Skein Of Language And Image Has Left His Reader, Who He Has Likely Never Met And Who Is Actually Thousands Of Readers.
Order
Trying
Language
Life Is Short, Very Short, And What Are We Doing Here If Not Trying To Become More Generous And Loving?
Life Is Short
Trying
Ifs
The Contours Of The Coming Disaster Expanded To Include The Deaths Of All Present.
Disaster
A Culture's Ability To Understand The World And Itself Is Critical To Its Survival. But Today We Are Led Into The Arena Of Public Debate By Seers Whose Main Gift Is Their Ability To Compel People To Continue To Watch Them.
People
Survival
Watches
Success Makes Opportunities And So Many Of Those "opportunities" Are Actually Exemptions - From Hardship, From Unfriendliness, From Struggle.
Struggle
Opportunity
Hardship
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.
Book
Levels
Strange
This May Be The One Clear Truth Of The So-called Border Issue: Put A Poor Country Next To A Rich One And Watch Which Way The Traffic Flows. Add Impediments, The Traffic Endeavors To Flow Around Them. Eilimate Disparity. The Traffic Stops.
Country
Issues
Borders
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.
Dream
Thinking
Ideas
I've Been Reading About And Writing About The Civil War Period And It Is So Striking That Slavery Was Never Made Right - [abraham] Lincoln Was Killed, Reconstruction Came Along, And All Of That Inequity Was Frozen In Place And Carried Forward Rather Smugly. So I Think The Burden Is Now Upon Us White People, To Say That This Systemic Inequality Offends Us.
War
Reading
Writing
I Think If Someone Could Demonstrate To Me That Fiction Did No Good, I Would Still Do It, Because I Think It Does Good For Me.
Thinking
Doe
Fiction
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.
Ideas
Trying
Stories
I Think People Have Come To Expect That In Artistic Representation; That Every Work Of Art Should Be A Work Of Extravagant Hope.
Art
Thinking
People
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.
Thinking
Years
Trying
One Of The Revelations In That Book [lincoln In The Bardo] For Me Was This Idea About Citizenship. Even That Word - Citizenship - For Someone My Age, It Makes Me Cringe. But, To Me, The Political Space We're In Now Argues For A Reboot Of Fairly Simple Ideas And The Examination Of The Way That Americans Have Not Been Living Into Them.
Book
Simple
Ideas
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.
Beautiful
Thinking
People
I'm Not Thinking Much About Overall Themes Or Preoccupations Or Anything Like That. Instead I'm Just Trusting That, If I'm Working Hard, Various Notions And Riffs And Motifs And So On Are Very Naturally Suffusing The Stories And The Resulting Book.
Book
Thinking
Stories
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.
Writing
Reality
Stories
I Hear That In My Head All The Time Now: 'why Don't You Go And See?'.
Whatever Your Supposed Politics Are - Left, Right - If You Put It In A Human Connection, Most People Will Rise To The Occasion And Feel The Human Pain In A Way That They Might Not If It Was Presented In A More Conceptual Way.
Pain
People
Connections
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.
Real
Writing
Past
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.
Growing Up
Writing
Intelligent
An Artist's Job Is To Be Interested In Things As They Are.
Jobs
Artist
I Often Wonder If There Are Certain Areas Of Real Life That Are Roped Off, With A Sign Saying, "art, Don't Come In Here." But That's Maybe A Deeper Question.
Art
Real
Wonder
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.
Giving
Political
Might
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.
Thinking
Challenges
Sentimental
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.
People
Tables
Way
The Story Sometimes Writes You Into A Corner.
Writing
Stories
Sometimes
Social Media Sometimes Feels Like A Vehicle For One-dimensional Sniping, More Than True Criticism.
Media
Criticism
Sniping
It's Not Fiction's Job To Be Photographically Representative Of Reality. If I Want To Make A Fictional World Where There's No Kindness, This Doesn't Mean I Believe There's No Kindness In The Real World. In Fact, What It May Mean Is That I Very Much Value Kindness. Like If You Make A Painting In Which Only Greens Are Allowed, It Wouldn't Mean You Don't Believe In Blue.
Jobs
Kindness
Real
The Idea Of Inclusion Has Become Kind Of A Stone That We've Passed Our Hand Over So Many Times That It Doesn't Mean Anything.
Mean
Hands
Ideas
If You Understand Writing As Primarily Engaging An Imaginary Reader, Well, You've Kind Of Been Doing That Your Whole Life. You Walk Into A Room And You're Engaging With Imaginary Strangers Because You Don't Actually Know Who They Are. For Me, It Was Really Empowering To Say: This Is A Branch Of Entertainment And Communication And Engagement, As Opposed To Jumping Over Some Perceived Literary High Bar. That Was The Buzzkill.
Communication
Writing
Jumping
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.
Dream
Ethos
America
Fiction Is Open To Whoever Comes In The Door, As Long As You Come In Energetically.
Doors
Long
Fiction
There Are Things That Are Shadow Sides Of The Creative Energy That Are Negative And All That Kind Of Stuff. The Only Thing That I Say To Myself Is, In The Spirit Of That Quote From The Gnostic Gospels: Writing Is A Way To Let All That Stuff Out Into The Sun.
Writing
Creative
Shadow
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.
Giving
Given
Lingering
I Don't Use The Word Lightly, In Fact, I Don't Use It At All, But Ben Marcus Is A Genius, One Of The Most Daring, Funny, Morally Engaged And Brilliant Writers, Someone Whose Work Truly Makes A Difference In The World. His Prose Is, For Me, Awareness Objectified-he Makes The Word New And Thus The World.
Differences
Making A Difference
Genius
I Was, Not An Altar Boy, But A Reader Of The Epistle, And I Walked In On A Nun And A Priest Furiously French Kissing When I Was In Seventh Grade. I Walked In, Saw It, And Went, "no Way," Backed Out, Composed Myself, And Went Back In, And It Was Still Going On. And The Experience Of Seeing That Was Actually Very Deep.
Kissing
Boys
Way
He Was A Father. That's What A Father Does.eases The Burdens Of Those He Loves. Saves The Ones He Loves From Painful Last Images That Might Endure For A Lifetime.
Fathers Day
Dad
Ease
When You Talk About A Reader Being Emotionally Moved, A Feeling Of Empathy, I Think That Comes Out Of That Line-by-line Respect For Reader. That's Actually Where It All Comes From.
Thinking
Empathy
Feelings
The Bush Administration Is A Paragon Of Wisdom.
Administration
Paragon
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.
Reality
Would Be
Answers
My Go-to Default Is To Try To Be Nice, Which I Feel Does Less Harm In The Long Run Than Trying To Be, Say, Assertive. If I Am Nice And Maybe Too Passive, I Find That Easier To Live With.
Running
Nice
Long
The Artist’s Job, I Think, Is To Be A Conduit For Mystery.
Jobs
Artist
Thinking
I Read Rand And Thought, "i Want To Be One Of The Earth Movers, The Scientific People Who Power The World. I Don't Want To Be One Of These Lisping Liberal Artsy Leeches." So I Was Working Against My Actual Abilities.
People
Leeches
World
If You Bring Forth What Is Within You, It Will Save You. If You Do Not Bring It Forth, It Will Destroy You.
Within You
Ifs
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.
Crazy
Real
Mind
In Fiction, Conceptualizing, I've Found, Produces Dull And Over-controlled Text.
Fiction
Dull
Produce
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.
Decision
Enthusiastic
Rings
My Artistic Approach Is That You're Supposed To Be A Little Baffled.
Artistic
I'm A Big Fan Of The Russians: Isaac Babel Is Just An Exquisite Line-to-line Stylist.
Fans
Stylist
Lines
Ralph Kramden, As Played By Jackie Gleason, Was This Big Bumbling New York City Bus Driver Who Was Kind Of Mean And Crass And A Little Bit Egotistical. But Underneath It All, He Was A Big Heart Looking For A Place To Land I Think.
New York
Mean
Heart
Goodbye. I Am Leaving Because I Am Bored.
Goodbye
Crazy
Mad
The Internet Kind Of Feels Like Happiness Sometimes, However. It Feels Like Stimulation.
Kind
Sometimes
Internet
My Heart Goes Out To Him. Sort Of. Because Empathy Depends On How You've Spent Your Day.
Heart
Empathy
My Heart
That Seems To Be The Definition Of 'novel' For Me: A Story That Hasn't Yet Discovered A Way To Be Brief.
Stories
Definitions
Way
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.
Sentimental
Henchmen
Tendencies
We Try, We Fail, We Posture, We Aspire, We Pontificate - And Then We Age, Shrink, Die, And Vanish.
Age
Trying
Failing
My Understanding Of Kindness Is That We Are Hoping To Be Truly Beneficial In Every Situation, And That This Desire Means A Whole Suite Of Things: Being Nicer, Sure, But Also Being More Aware, More Present, More Articulate, More Fearless, Less Habituated, Etc., Etc. And Sometimes Even Being Firm, Or Having An Edge, Or Even Being Angry.
Kindness
Mean
Understanding
With Non-fiction Writing I Feel Like I'm Confined And Driven By What Actually Happened. That Makes The "plot". So It's A Process Of Getting All Of My Notes Typed Up, Then Scanning Through The Notes, Trying To Extract Or Find Certain Vignettes That Seem Like They Might Write Well - That Might Have A Potential For Good Energy, Shape, Etc. And Then At Some Point I Start Stringing These Together, Keeping An Eye On The Word Count.
Eye
Writing
Trying
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.
Lucky
Generations
Genre
The One Thing Fiction And Non-fiction Writing Have In Common For Me Is That Sense Of Trying To Get The Sentences To Be Minimal But At The Same Time Be A Little Overfull - To Encourage Them To Do A Kind Of Poetic Work.
Writing
Trying
Fiction
We're In The Transition Between Birth And Death. But The One That People Often Know About Is The Transition Between The Moment Of Death And Whatever Comes Next, So Reincarnation Or Heaven Or Hell.
People
Heaven
Birth
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.
Night
Thinking
Kind
If You Think Of A Work Of Fiction As A Kind Of Scale Model Of The World, Then The Positive Valences - Where Things Turn Out Better Than You Thought They Would - Ought To Be In There Somewhere, Too.
Thinking
Fiction
World
I Used To Joke About This But I've Recently Realized That I Really Believe It: I Spent Many Years Training Myself To Write Very Slowly For Pretty Good Money. So The Idea Of Writing Really Quickly For Free Offends Me.
Believe
Writing
Years
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.
Writing
Thinking
Style
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.
Risk
Chicago
Sides
Just Through The Process Of Trying To Make The Living And The Dead Feel Real, All These Little Benefits Came Out. And These Benefits Turned Out To Be Much More Articulate Statements Of What I Really Believe. And Somehow They Were More Convincing Because They Were Arrived At At Such Length.
Real
Believe
Trying
Developing Our Sympathetic Compassion Is Not Only Possible But The Only Reason For Us To Be Here On Earth.
Compassion
Earth
Reason
I'm Very Happy - If I Can Do Even A Little Bit Of Work To Get The Short Story Out More, I'm Thrilled.
Stories
Littles
Short Story
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.
Artist
Ideas
Understanding
If I Can Be More Efficient, I'm Actually Being More Respectful To The Reader, Which Then Implies A Greater Intimacy With The Reader.
Intimacy
Respectful
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.
Order
Historical
Acting
I Know What It Feels Like To Be In That Middle And Lower-middle Class, And Feel Like The Culture Is Passing You By; It Translates Into A Great Sense Of Personal Frustration That Can Then Morph Into Political Frustration.
Frustration
Class
Political
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.
Stories
Kind
Odd
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.
Spiritual
Country
Long
I Heard Zen Teacher One Time Talking About Abortion, And He Was Saying The Way That Abortion Makes Bad Karma Is Any Time The Person Involved Pretends That There's Not A Cost To The Choice, One Way Or The Other; Whether You Get It Or Don't Get It, There's A Cost. That's Just Basic Responsibility, To Admit That There's A Cost. And The Bad Karma Is When You Pretend That The Thing Is Free.
Karma
Teacher
Responsibility
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.
Intelligent
Data
Fiction
Fiction Is A Kind Of Compassion-generating Machine That Saves Us From Sloth. Is Life Kind Or Cruel? Yes, Literature Answers. Are People Good Or Bad? You Bet, Says Literature. But Unlike Other Systems Of Knowing, Literature Declines To Eradicate One Truth In Favor Of Another.
Compassion
Knowing
People
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.
Giving Up
Mean
Important
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.
Writing
Mean
Thinking
Compassion Doesn't Have To Be Weak Or Enabling; It Can Also Be Quite Bold.
Compassion
Enabling
Weak
Equality Has Always Been Extant But Some Of Us Just Didn't Know It.
Knows
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