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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.

-George Saunders

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Every Writer Knows That

George Saunders

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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.

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If You Could Press A Button And Your Ego Investment Was Less, The Toothache Would Be Less. Or Less Tragic At Least.

I'm A Big Fan Of The Russians: Isaac Babel Is Just An Exquisite Line-to-line Stylist.

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

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.

What Really Interests Me, On A Deeper Level, Is How Our Information Is Coming To Us In Some Kind Of Messed Up Way That Is Making Us Idiotic. I Don't Think We've Become More Idiotic Than We Always Were, But I Think The Information Transfer Is Funky. The Shorthand Of It Is That Social Media Is Making Us Mentally Insane.

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 Greatest Thing About Writing A Book Is That At First It's All Inchoate, But The More You Work On It, The More The Book Teaches You Its Internal Rules.

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.

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.

Falling In Love

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

Success Is Like A Mountain That Keeps Growing Ahead Of You As You Hike It... Err In The Direction Of Kindness.

I Have This Tendency To Take A Little Bit Of Questionable Knowledge And Riff On It.

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.

I'm Comfortable With Anything After The Fact.

We Have To Move Toward Specificity, Intelligence, Facts, Proof, And Mutual Affection. What I Think People Have To Do Now Is Be Very, Very Assertive About The Utter Essentiality Of Intellectual Undertakings.

If You Haven't Read You Don't Have The Voice. The Lack Of Voice Eliminates Experience.

Back In 1992, I Had My First Story Accepted By 'the New Yorker.'

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.

To Me, The Process Of Writing Is Just Reading What I've Written And - Like Running Your Hand Over One Of Those Mod Glass Stovetops To Find Where The Heat Is - Looking For Where The Energy Is In The Prose, Then Going In The Direction Of That. It's An Exercise In Being Open To Whatever Is There.

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.

I Came Away Believing And Really Deeply Troubled By Is The Extent To Which You Can Have Two Well-intentioned People Talking In A Friendly Spirit And You Get To A Point Where The Two Mutual Mythologies Just Don't Intersect. So Kind Of The Next Piece I'd Like To Write Or Think About Is How Did This Left-right Divide Get So Weird And Codified.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Actually Do Believe In Life After Death.

Life After Death

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.

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.

Your First Responsibility Is To Yourself And To Your Own Goodness Of Heart.

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.

In The Buddhist Texts, Some Of Them Say, When You Die, Basically That Wild Horse Gets Cut Loose, And The Mind Is Incredibly Powerful And Expansive, Omniscient And Can Go Anywhere And See Anything, But - And This Is The Catch - It's Colored By The Habits Of Thought We Made In Life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

...smile First, Then Speak.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Both [donald] Trump And Bernie [sanders] Got To This Idea Of The Vanishing Middle Class Sooner And With More Passion Than More Mainstream Politicians, And Benefited From It. The Difference, Of Course, Is That Bernie Understood This In A More Compassionate Framework, And Talked About It In Conjunction With A Revitalization Of Another Part Of The American Project, Which Is The Notion That We Are All Created Equal, And That Our Laws And Culture And Action Ought To Reflect That.

It Is Technically Very Hard To Show Positive Manifestations. But I Can Look Back At The Way I Thought And Felt Even As A Little Kid And There Was A Lot Of Wonder There, And Openness To The Many Sides Of Life.

If Death Is In The Room, It's Pretty Interesting. But I Would Also Say That I'm Interested In Getting Myself To Believe That It's Going To Happen To Me. I'm Interested In It, Because If You're Not, You're Nuts. It's Really De Facto What We're Here To Find Out About.

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

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.

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.

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.

"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 Think Each Writer Has To Seek Her Most Energetic Prose Style. She Has To Find A Way To Write So That Nobody Can Deny It.

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

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.

That's One Of The Reasons I Take A Lot Of Consolation In Fiction. You Have Years To Work On It. I Think That Allows You To Reach For The Best Part Of Your Reader Instead Of A Lot Of The Internet Stuff, In Which You're Kind Of Reaching For The Worst Or The Most Shallow Part Of Your Reader.

It's So Ironic That You Often Hear These Right-wing People Talking About The Constitution.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There Are Books That I Read Years Ago That Enlivened Things In Me That Haven't Died Yet.

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.

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.

Since, 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. There’s A Confusion In Each Of Us, A Sickness, Really: Selfishness. But There’s Also A Cure. So Be A Good And Proactive And Even Somewhat Desperate Patient On Your Own Behalf - Seek Out The Most Efficacious Anti-selfishness Medicines, Energetically, For The Rest Of Your Life.

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.

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

Social Media Sometimes Feels Like A Vehicle For One-dimensional Sniping, More Than True Criticism.

I Remember Reading The Bluest Eye When I Was A Young Parent, And Something Opened In Me. That's The Highest Aspiration.

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

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."

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.

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.

Whole Idea Is Really Intriguing To Me. If You Took Snapshots Of Ourselves Throughout The Day, The Way That Our Mind Is Twisting And Turning, Then At The Moment Of Death, The Mind Would Be Twisting And Turning In The Same Way. But The Buddhists Say It's Super-sized Because There's No Bodily Damper On It.

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.

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.

It Really Strikes Me How Much Of Your Energy In America, Especially If You're From A Working Back-ground, Is Spent Just Keeping Your Head Above Water. It Really Saps Your Grace And Your Strength.

Every Writer Has To Find The Thing To Keep Her Eye On About Which She Has Strong Opinions. That's Of Course Deeply Personal, But The Nice Thing Is That It Has To Do With Joy Rather Than Fear. It Has To Do With You. If You're Funny, Your Method Will Be To Try To Be Funnier. Which Again Is Empowering I Think.

I Think That's One Of The Maybe Under-discussed Aspects Of Process - The Difference Between A Good Writing Day And A Bad One Is The Quality Of The Split-second Decisions You Made.

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

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.

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?"

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.

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

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.

I Don't Like That New Age Posture Where You Kind Of Tilt Your Head. I Don't Like That Posture Right Now. I Want Something A Little More Confident And More Sure Of The Values That We're Defending, Which Are The Old Ones, Love And Empathy And Patience And Tolerance And Civility. Not To Get Into Politics Or Anything.

Toni Morrison Seems To Have A Lot Of Faith In People - That's What I Mean By Gentle Power.

I Knew If I Evoked That Stuff Too Easily Or Gratuitously, As A Way Of Assuaging My Fears Of Not Being Edgy Or Whatever, The Writing Would Fall Apart. This Book [lincoln In The Bardo] Was Going To Have To Have Some Earnestness In It.

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.

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.

I've Had The Thought That A Person's 'artistic Vision' Is Really Just The Cumulative Combination Of Whatever Particular Stances He Has Sincerely Occupied During His Creative Life - Even If Some Of Those Might Appear Contradictory.

I Might Take From The Current Political Chaos A Desire To Somehow Reflect Its Essential Qualities In A Story - The Blatant Lies That Get Accepted With Repetition; The Way Mass Media Seems To Be Agitating People En Masse; The Way, Particularly, That A Relatively Lucky And Affluent And Privileged Population Can Be Undone By A Certain Spoiled Quality; That Feeling When Two Decent People Violently Disagree, Because They Are Arguing From Two Non-intersecting Data Sets - Well, The List Goes On.

I'm Not Sure I Would Call It Agony But There Is A Kind Of Cyclic Frustration. You Get One Story Right And Then Here Comes Another One. When Does That End? What I'm Trying To Do Is Get It To End Right Now, By Recognizing That That Cycle Is Writing. That Is: Trying To Understand The Frustrations And Setbacks (and Agony) As Part Of A Bigger Chess Game You Are Playing With Art Itself.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Think When You Get To Export Your Creative Impulse Into Something, It Kind Of Lessens That Busy Energy That Can Be So Confrontational And Pissy.

In The Reason That The Contrast Between The Absolute And The Relative Is So Terrible Is Because We Believe So Fully In Ourselves As Permanent, Continuous, And Central. I Feel Insane Saying This, But If One Weren't So Deluded About The Permanent Reality Of The Self, A Lot Of This Pain Would Actually Lessen.

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.

There's Not A Lot Of Whimsicality In The Form, Not A Lot Of Indulgence Allowed. Like When I Was Younger, I Would Sometimes Go, "oh, Every Other Section Will Be Narrated By A Chair." Or, "it Will Be A Double Helix Shape!" That Never Really Worked.

One Of The Inspiring Things About Susan Sarandon Career Is That There's A Quality Of Real Fearlessness In It - You Seem To Be In It For The Challenge And The Experience.

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.

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."

Goodbye. I Am Leaving Because I Am Bored.

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.

Even The Written History [of Abraham Lincoln's Times] Is Poorly Understood By Most People.

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.

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.

A Person Supporting [donald]trump Likes Trump. And I Think They Would Say The Same About Me.

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 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.

It's A Time When A Lot Of Principle Virtues Are Being Tested. Do We Still Believe In The Truth? Do We Still Believe In Empathy? Do We Still Believe The Protection Of The Weakest Among Us? These Are Yes Or No Questions, But The Means Of Communication Is All Tied Up With Those Virtues And You Can't Abandon Those Virtues As You Pursue Them.

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.

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

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.

Character Is That Sum Total Of Moments We Can't Explain.

The Thing I've Discovered That Is A Help Is That There Isn't A Simple Virtue Or A Simple Vice. They're Always Connected. If You Have Tendency A, That You Loathe, You Can Almost Be Sure That Tendency B, Which You Love, Is Somehow Connected To It.

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.

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.

Positive Human Action Is Not Only Possible, But Pervasive; Human Beings Can Improve And Choose Light And So On. And This Is All Happening.

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.

I Read To Make Myself Feel Awake.

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].

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.

I Love The Feeling Of Being On The Hunt - The Feeling That The Story Is Refusing To Be Solved In Some Lesser Way And Is Insisting That You See It On Its Highest Terms.

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.

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.

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.

If You Bring Forth What Is Within You, It Will Save You. If You Do Not Bring It Forth, It Will Destroy You.

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.

Developing Our Sympathetic Compassion Is Not Only Possible But The Only Reason For Us To Be Here On Earth.

If I Can Be More Efficient, I'm Actually Being More Respectful To The Reader, Which Then Implies A Greater Intimacy With The Reader.

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 Think This Is The Other Big Issue That Is Not Going Away: Do We Really Believe That Bit In The Constitution Or Not? I Think We Do.

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.

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.

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 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.

There Comes That Phase In Life When, Tired Of Losing, You Decide To Stop Losing, Then Continue Losing. Then You Decide To Really Stop Losing, And Continue Losing. The Losing Goes On And On So Long You Begin To Watch With Curiosity, Wondering How Low You Can Go.

Let's Say There's Something Operating In You Called Mind. It's Very Powerful, But It's Dampened By The Body, By Physicality. When You Die, That Tether Gets Cut And Off The Mind Goes With Incredible Power.

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.

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.

Later, I Went One Step Further, By Putting In Some Invented "historical" Bits [into The Lincoln In The Bardo]. And Reading Those Alongside The Actual Historical Bits Was Like Looking Into A Sort Of A Painful Mirror, Because "my" Parts Were So Show-offy At First. They Stood Out Because They Were So Flamboyant.

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.

In Real Life, When You Have An Emotional Experience, It's Never Just Because Of The Thing That's Been Said. There's The Backstory. It's Like [ernest] Hemingway's Iceberg Theory - The Current Emotional Moment Is The Tip Of The Iceberg And All Of The Past Is The Seven-eighths Of The Iceberg That's Underwater.

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.

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

What Was Fun For Me With This Book [lincoln In The Bardo] Was To Start Out With The Principle That Went, "we're Going To Fight Every Day To Make This Not A Novel; Make It Too Short To Be A Novel." And Then With That Principle In Place, The Book Sort Of Starts To Say, "okay, But I Really Need This. I Really Need Some Historical Nuggets." And You're Like, "all Right, But Keep It Under Control."

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

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

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.

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

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.

If A Writer Understands His Work As Something That Originates With Him But Then, With Any Luck, Gets Away From Him, Then What He Needs Is Someone Who Can Grasp The Potential Of The Piece And Lead Him To That Higher Ground.

Some Of Buddhist Texts Say That, In The Moment After You Die, You Think Of New Jersey And You Go To New Jersey Or You Think Of 1820 And You Go To 1820. Also, All Your Sort Of Inner-symbology Gets Writ Large. So, If You're A Christian, You See Christian Iconography.

The One Thing I Noticed Retroactively Was That The Energy At Those Trump Rallies Was Off The Charts Compared To The Hillary Clinton Rallies. The Bernie Sanders Energy Was As Good, Gentler, But There Was A Real Passion There.

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.

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.

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.

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.

...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.

In The Absolute Sense - Kind Of From The God's-eye View - God Might Feel Like, "i Made This Thing That Has All Of That In It, All The Horror And All The Beauty."

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.

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 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.

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.

I've Had That My Whole Career. People Were Always Hedging Around The Question Of: Why Are You So Dark? What Happened To You?

I Really Wanted To Be Allowed To The [writer's] Table. So It Makes Me Happy To Be At The Table. It Sounds A Little Shallow, But If I Imagine The Shadow Life, Where I Didn't Get That Chance, And All The Ways My Negative Inclinations Would Have Bloomed If I Hadn't Gotten The Attention, But Also The Creative Outlet ... I'm Not Actually That Happy. I Have Multiplicities. My Happiness Blooms And It Wilts.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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

Don't Be Afraid To Be Confused. Try To Remain Permanently Confused. Anything Is Possible.

I Always Cheerfully Say, "well, You Know, The Species Is Adapting, And Whatever It Needs To Do, It'll Do," But I Do Think It's Maybe A Little Bit Alarming. Everybody Knows That One Thing We Really Have To Do Is To Be More Wherever We Are, More Present, That's Just Kind Of A Commonplace. And The Whole Mobile Phone Thing Is Completely 100% The Opposite - To Never Be Where You Are Because You Can Always Be Somewhere Else; And Yet It's So Fun And Addictive.

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.

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.

Equality Has Always Been Extant But Some Of Us Just Didn't Know It.

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).

And I Have Finally Realized That, You Know, It's Not A Given That My Lifespan Will Accommodate My Writing Aspirations. It Could Be That It Would Take Me 12 More Books At Six Years Each To Get It - Which Means I Would Have To Live To Be 126. Which I Fully Intend To Do, Of Course.

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 Have Lunch, Flirt With Some Local Grandmothers, Undercut My Flirting By Crotching Myself On The Corner Of A Table As I Leave. -- "the Great Divider

My Habit Would Have Been To Veer Towards The Dark - To Prove I Was Something; Edgy, Or Maybe To Prove That I Was Cognisant Of The Dark Side. Now, With Age And Confidence, I Can Say, Yeah, That's True, But I Am Cognisant Of The Fact That People Can Do Things Well. And Can Be More Loving Than You Expect.

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.

Stories, As Much As We Like To Talk About Them, Retrospectively, As Emanations Of Theme Or Worldview Or Intention, Occur Primarily As Technical Objects When They're Being Written. Or At Least They Do For Me. They're The Result Of Thousands Of Decisions Made At Speed During Revision.

Working With Language Is A Means By Which We Can Identify The Bullshit Within Ourselves (and Others).

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'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.

It Really Was Something, To See Ram Bahadur Bomjon, Apparently Living Without Food Or Water. Before I Went On That Trip I'd Asked Advice On It From A Very Wise Person Who I Love And Revere - Basically Trying To See If I Was Somehow Disrespecting Buddhism By Trying To Write About It, And Also Looking For Some Grounding On What Stance To Take ... And My Friend Said, "well, Why Don't You Just Go And See?" And I Hear That In My Head All The Time Now: "why Don't You Go And See?"

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