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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.

-George Saunders

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I Always Cheerfully Say,

George Saunders

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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.

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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.

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

I Know That My Only Chance At Any Kind Of Depth Or Profundity Is To Linger Within The Story, Trying To Make It Distinguish Itself.

Err In The Direction Of Kindness.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The Weird Thing Was That I Went To Trump Rallies Thinking I Was Going To Run Into Militant, Right Wing, Racist People And Mostly I Didn't. That Should Have Been A Clue To Me. The People I Talked To Were Not, On The Surface Level, Crazy. They Were Quite Nice, Quite Normal, Employed, And Actually Were Wealthier Than The Press At That Time Would Have Led Us To Believe. At That Time, The Narrative Was That These Were All Working Poor But These Were Not Working Poor. That Should've Been A Clue To Me That This Was A Little Bigger Than I Thought.

What I Regret Most In My Life Are Failures Of Kindness.

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.

The Mind Is A Machine That Is Constantly Asking: What Would I Prefer? Close Your Eyes, Refuse To Move, And Watch What Your Mind Does. What It Does Is Become Discontent With That-which-is. A Desire Arises, You Satisfy That Desire, And Another Arises In Its Place.

So Much Of What I Am Doing In My Fiction Is Just Trying To Get Into Interesting Places In Terms Of Language Or Form, Places That Don't Bore Me. And This Happens Via Hundreds Of Quick Micro-decisions That Are Done "to Taste," So To Speak. So The Experience Is One Of Groping Toward That Interesting Place - Trying To Leap Away From Anything That Seems Boring, Or About Which I Don't Have Strong Opinions. Essentially Trying To Avoid That Moment Where, Devoid Of Any Strong Feeling, I Start Conceptualizing.

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?

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'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.

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

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

Now, We Don't Really Believe These Things - Intellectually We Know Better - But We Believe Them Viscerally, And Live By Them, And They Cause Us To Prioritize Our Own Needs Over The Needs Of Others, Even Though What We Really Want, In Our Hearts, Is To Be Less Selfish, More Aware Of What's Actually Happening In The Present Moment, More Open, And More Loving.

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.

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!"

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.

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.

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

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!"

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 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.

I Don't Tend To Work Directly From Life, Except In Trying To Mimic Or Match The Outlines Of Its Insanity. In Other Words, When I Live Through Something, I Just Try To Say To Myself, "ok, Remember This - Life Is Really This Crazy Or Scary Or Beautiful Or Surprising - So Try To 'get At' That In Your Stories.

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

What Concerns Me Most Is The Horrible Degradation Our Notions Of Truth, Civility, And Decency Have Undergone. Also The Way That Language Has Been Malformed - We Have Been Overcome With Banality And The Cynical Misuse Of Language. When A Candidate Runs A Campaign On A Series Of Dog-whistles To Bigots, Then Turns Around And Talks About "healing The Wounds Of Division," That Is Right Out Of Orwell.

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

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

With Fiction, And Also With Nonfiction That You Can Take Your Time Doing, You Have A Much Better Chance Of Reaching Across The Divide And Connecting With Somebody Who Is Opposed To You On Some Things. They're Opposed To You On One Axis, Which Is Politics, But If You Go Over The Axis Called Puppies, You Might Find Some Common Ground.

...smile First, Then Speak.

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

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

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

The End Of The Day

I Was Thinking About The Legacy Of Ghosts In Fiction, And Specifically The Moral Power Of Those Dickensian Ghosts. Because A Ghost Can Be A Very Powerful But Also Manipulative Element.

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.

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.

The Chances Of A Person Breaking Through Their Own Habits And Sloth And Limited Mind To Actually Write Something That Gets Out There And Matters To People Are Slim.

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.

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

I Sometimes Imagine A Great Writer As A Sort Of God-surrogate: The Writer Is Doing His Or Her Human-best To Emulate What God Might Think Of Is, If God Was Inclined To Observe Some Human Beings And Present Their Activities In The Form Of A Narrative.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I 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?"

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.

You Don't Want To Spend Your Life Writing About Stuff That Doesn't Matter. You Want To Try To Pull Out Of The Temporal Mediocre And Write In A Way That Is Meaningful To Everybody. This Goes Back To This Idea Of Being Intimate With Your Reader. Since We're All Down Here And We're All Dying And Aspiring And Loving And Feeling Inadequate, All These Things That We All Are Doing All The Time, What A Relief It Is, When Somebody Looks At You And Says, "yeah, Me Too."

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

I'm Very Happy - If I Can Do Even A Little Bit Of Work To Get The Short Story Out More, I'm Thrilled.

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.

While I'm Doing [writing], I Don't Feel It.i Don't Think That's A Failing. I Think It's Just A Feature. Like, A Feature Of Oneself.

I Actually Do Believe In Life After Death.

Life After Death

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.

[in The Moment Of Reading Writer And Reader] Are Both Briefly Their Best Selves, Or At Least Better Selves. A Flawed Human Being Writes Something And 60 Years Later A Reader Picks Up The Book And Something In Them Rises To Meet 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'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.

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

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.

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.

I'd Just Say That Truth Is Power And Vice Versa.

I'm Always Nice When I Do Drugs. But, You Know, I'm Nicer On The Drug Called "writing."

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.

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.

To Me, The Writer's Main Job Is To Just Make The Story Unscroll In Such A Way That The Reader Is Snared - She's Right There, Seeing Things Happen And Caring About Them. And If You Dedicate Yourself To This Job, The Meanings More Or Less Take Care Of Themselves. That's The Theory, Anyway.

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

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.

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.

To Understand Any Plea For Further Consideration Of A Group You Don't Know Anything About To Be Some Form Of, Quote, Political Correctness. These Things Are Bubbling Right Under Us.

What America Is, To Me, Is A Guy Doesn't Want To Buy, You Let Him Not Buy, You Respect His Not Buying. A Guy Has A Crazy Notion Different From Your Crazy Notion, You Pat Him On The Back And Say, Hey Pal, Nice Crazy Notion, Let's Go Have A Beer. America, To Me, Should Be Shouting All The Time, A Bunch Of Shouting Voices, Most Of Them Wrong, Some Of Them Nuts, But Please, Not Just One Droning Glamorous Reasonable Voice.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

[writing] Is Almost Like Those Boats That Sit Really Low In The Water; They Look Kind Of Ugly. And Then You Get One Of Them Up To 80 Miles An Hour And The Hull Comes Up, And It's A Beautiful Thing. I'm Okay With That For Myself.

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

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.

America, To Me, Should Be Shouting All The Time, A Bunch Of Shouting Voices, Most Of Them Wrong, Some Of Them Nuts, But Please, Not Just One Droning Glamourous Reasonable Voice.

The Universal Human Laws - Need, Love For The Beloved, Fear, Hunger, Periodic Exaltation, The Kindness That Rises Up Naturally In The Absence Of Hunger/fear/pain - Are Constant, Predictable, Reliable, Universal, And Are Merely Ornamented With The Details Of Local Culture.

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

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.

That Underscored This Idea That When We're Reading A Book Or Writing A Book, You're In An Act Of Co-creation. The Reader And The Writer Are Both Trying To Dress Up And Present Their Best Selves And Then There's That Moment, When Suddenly, As A Reader, You're Not Exactly You Anymore, And Likewise, As A Writer, You're Not Really You.

In A Certain Way, We're Always Toggling Back And Forth Between The Absolute And The Relative, If That Makes Sense.

I Think People Have Come To Expect That In Artistic Representation; That Every Work Of Art Should Be A Work Of Extravagant Hope.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I 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.

Sometimes I Think Fiction Exists To Model The Way God Might Think Of Us, If God Had The Time And Inclination To Do So.

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.

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

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.

Whatever Happens, We Can Deal With It If We Admit That It's Happening And So On. So To Be Comfortable With What Is - That Is A Real Superpower.

Whatever Happens

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.

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

I Think 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.

The Artist’s Job, I Think, Is To Be A Conduit For Mystery.

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 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.

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.

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.

The One Thing About A Christmas Carol That Always Bothers Me Is That Cratchit Is So Sweet And Perfect. He's Like An Ivy League Kid Who Just Is Labeled "poor." He Doesn't Have Any Bad Habits. He's Never Cranky With His Kids.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?".

In My Case, When I Am Trying To Be "kind" I Often Default In A Sort Of Toothless Loving-all Stance That Is, Actually, Not Kind, Because It Is Not Truthful.

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.

What I Really Found Myself Interested In Was The Idea That Our Minds Our So Powerful And When We're Living, The Mind Is Dampened By The Body. As Crazy As Our Minds Can Get, They're Only So Crazy Because They're Physically Housed.

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 Starting To Withdraw From [technology] As Much As I Can. I Don't Do Much Of The Social Media Stuff. Like, If I'm On Facebook, It Changes My Relation To The Real World In A Way That Makes Me Feel Sick - Almost Like I've Had Too Much Sugar Or Something.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

What Evil Does First In The World, Maybe, Is Distract Us From Our Pursuit Of Goodness.

"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.

An Artist's Job Is To Be Interested In Things As They Are.

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.

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.

As Much As We - In A Revisionist Way - Tell Ourselves That We've Always Been A Righteous Country With A Couple Of Swerves Off The Path, We Need To Look Back And See That We've Always Also Been A Racist Country And Have Had A Tendency Towards Banal Aggressiveness. The Thing That's Alarming Is Not So Much That A Few People In America At The Top Are Initiating These Crazy Policies, But That The Middle Is Willing To Go There Too. There's A Strange Movement Of The Middle To This Position Of Banal Aggressiveness.

Success Is Like A Mountain In Front Of You That Keeps Growing. If You're Not Careful, It Will Take Up Your Whole Life.

I've Seen Time And Time Again The Way That The Process Of Trying To Say Something Dignifies And Improves A Person.

I Don't Know How You Feel, But I Feel Like Writing, Clarity Of Thought, And Truth Have Been Validated Because We See What Happens When We Get Lax In Those Areas. I'm Excited By The Idea That Writers Like Us Can Actually Reach Out And Try To Understand And Prod And Agitate The People Who Are In Support Of Trump Because We Have The Tools To Do It. We're Language People And We're Idea People.

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

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.

Still, Accomplishment Is Unreliable. "succeeding," Whatever That Might Mean To You, Is Hard, And The Need To Do So Constantly Renews Itself (success Is Like A Mountain That Keeps Growing Ahead Of You As You Hike It), And There's The Very Real Danger That "succeeding" Will Take Up Your Whole Life, While The Big Questions Go Untended.

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.

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

My Heart Goes Out To Him. Sort Of. Because Empathy Depends On How You've Spent Your Day.

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.

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

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

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

I Have A 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.

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.

Making A Difference

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.

The Story Sometimes Writes You Into A Corner.

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.

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.

I See That Being Looked At Askance As A Form Of Elitism Now, Which Is Really Scary.

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.

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.

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

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.

Every Step Was A Victory. He Had To Remember That.

So I May Not Have Had A Gothic Childhood, But Childhood Makes Its Own Gothicity.

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 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].

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.

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.

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

I'm A Control Freak. I'm Defensive. And I'm An Egomaniac. That's True About Me.

I Always Describe Writing A Story As Throwing Bowling Pins In The Air And Then Catching Them.

What I'm Primarily Saying,' He Says, 'is That This Is A Time For Knowledge Assimilation, Not Backstabbing. We Learned A Lesson, You And I. We Personally Grew. Gratitude For This Growth Is An Appropriate Response. Gratitude, And Being Careful Never To Make The Same Mistake Twice.

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

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.

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

Monologue Is The Most Honest Way To Represent Human Beings.

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.

Reading Is A Form Of Prayer, A Guided Meditation That Briefly Makes Us Believe We're Someone Else, Disrupting The Delusion That We're Permanent And At The Center Of The Universe. Suddenly (we're Saved!) Other People Are Real Again, And We're Fond Of Them.

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.

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