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I Am Trying To Remember That Things Have Certainly Been Crazier In Human History And They May Get Crazier Here And Now, And [here I Am Trying To Be Optimistic] It's Even A Good Thing, To Be Going Through All Of This, If Only To Be Reminded That History Hasn't Stopped - Human Existence Is As Fundamentally Unmanageable Now As It Ever Was.

-George Saunders

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I Am Trying To

George Saunders

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I Am Trying To Remember That Things Have Certainly Been Crazier In Human History And They May Get Crazier Here And Now, And [here I Am Trying To Be Optimistic] It's Even A Good Thing, To Be Going Through All Of This, If Only To Be Reminded That History Hasn't Stopped - Human Existence Is As Fundamentally Unmanageable Now As It Ever Was.

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Night Was Falling. Birds Were Singing. Birds Were, It Occurred To Me To Say, Enacting A Frantic Celebration Of Day's End. They Were Manifesting As The Earth's Bright-colored Nerve Endings, The Sun's Descent Urging Them Into Activity, Filling Them Individually With Life Nectar, The Life Nectar Then Being Passed Into The World, Out Of Each Beak, In The Form Of That Bird's Distinctive Song, Which Was, In Turn, An Accident Of Beak Shape, Throat Shape, Breast Configuration, Brain Chemistry: Some Birds Blessed In Voice, Others Cursed; Some Squeaking, Others Rapturous.

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.

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

The Bush Administration Is A Paragon Of Wisdom.

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 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.

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

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

Clarity Of Purpose

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

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

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

I'm A Liberal And I'm Left Of Gandhi And I Don't Like Trump.

"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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Wild Imagination

I 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 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.

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."

[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.

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

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.

You Can See A Whole Book As A Series Of Creating An Expectation And Then Delivering A Skew On That Expectation So It's Not Totally Satisfied.

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.

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.

In A Story, For Example, You'll Start Off With A Character Who Is A Little Bit Of A Cartoon. That's Not Satisfying And You Start Revising. And As You Revise You Always Are Making It Better By Being Specific And By Observing More Closely, Which Actually Is Really The Same As Saying You Love Your Characters. The Close Observation Equals Love Of Them.

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

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 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.

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.

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 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 Don't Mind Being Criticized Intelligently; Although I Don't Love 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.

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.

[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.

We All Think We Know What Happens After Death. But Maybe It's Going To Be Not Only Weird But Also Dorky And Comic And Inconsistent.

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

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

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.

She Said America Was A Spoiled Child Ignorant Of Grief.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Would Kind Of, You Know, Go Stand Next To Some Unlucky Guy And Say Eventually, Hi, I'm George. You Know, I'm With The New Yorker. I'm A Liberal. I'm Somewhat Left Of Gandhi. Do You Want To Talk? And, You Know, They Always Did.

I've Always Wanted To Write Energetic, Atypical Sentences, I.e., Sentences That Were Not Normal Or Bland.

I Like [barak] Obama. I Like Him. So How Far Does Rationality Help To Persuade Anybody? You Know, I'm Not So Sure.

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."

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Based On The Experience Of My Life, Which I Have Not Exactly Hit Out Of The Park, I Tend To Agree With That Thing About, If It's Not Broke, Don't Fix It. And Would Go Even Further To: Even If It Is Broke, Leave It Alone, You'll Probably Make It Worse.

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."

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

All Traditions Are Also Full Of Meanness For The Sake Of Meanness.

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.

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

I 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.

The Traveller Must, Of Course, Always Be Cautious Of The Overly Broad Generalisation. But I Am An American, And A Paucity Of Data Does Not Stop Me From Making Sweeping, Vague, Conceptual Statements And, If Necessary, Following These Statements Up With Troops.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Tend To Foster Drama Via Bleakness. If I Want The Reader To Feel Sympathy For A Character, I Cleave The Character In Half, On His Birthday. And Then It Starts Raining. And He's Made Of Sugar.

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.

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.

[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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I Try To Keep My Artistic Opinions Not So Much "to Myself" But "on Myself."

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

To Me That Really Would Be The Essence Of Kindness, To Have One's Awareness So Developed And Refined That You Could Tell Just What Was Needed, And Not Do Any More Or Any Less, And Maybe Not Even Be Aware Of What You Had Done, Except It Would Be A Helpful Thing Because Of How Fully Present You Were. Well, As Aerosmith Once Famously Said: Dream On.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Was, Not An Altar Boy, But A Reader Of The Epistle, And I Walked In On A Nun And A Priest Furiously French Kissing When I Was In Seventh Grade. I Walked In, Saw It, And Went, "no Way," Backed Out, Composed Myself, And Went Back In, And It Was Still Going On. And The Experience Of Seeing That Was Actually Very Deep.

The Word 'funny' Is A Bit Like The Word 'love' - We Don't Have Enough Words To Describe The Many Varieties.

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

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

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.

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.

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!"

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.

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 Comfortable With Anything After The Fact.

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

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.

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

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

I 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.

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.

On One Level, I Am A Total Softie, Sort Of Depressed And Afraid Of Losing The People I Love Or Failing Them. To Disguise That, There's All This Harsh, Poop-centric, External Swagger, Full Of Nastiness. I'm A Cloaking Device.

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

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

Success Makes Opportunities And So Many Of Those "opportunities" Are Actually Exemptions - From Hardship, From Unfriendliness, From Struggle.

The Story Sometimes Writes You Into A Corner.

A Country Doesn't Need A Businessman To Run It: It Needs A Heartful, Worldly, Compassionate Leader.

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 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.

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.

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

I Had An Experience A Few Years Ago Where I Was On A Plane In Which One Of The Engines Went Out. I Couldn't Even Remember My Name. I Was Just Repeating The Word No Over And Over.

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.

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.

When I'm Not Writing, I Tend To Get Depressed And A Little Bit Surly. And Then When I'm Writing, Suddenly I Feel Enlivened. Now The Only Thing As I'm Getting Older That I Notice Is That It's A Pattern.

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].

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If You At Least Try To Do The Things That Excite You, It Will Make You A More Expansive And Present Person - You’ll Feel, At The End Of Your Life, That At Least You Took The Shot.

All Storytelling Is Kind Of That - There's A Bit Of Text That You Put Pressure On That Spits Out Some Desire That A Character Has And Then You Follow That. The Other Part Is That Every Scene Raises An Expectation In The Reader's Mind - That's Part Of Its Job Is To Make You Look In And Be Curious.

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

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 Understand What Something Short Should Be Like. I Understand Beauty In That Form. If I Start Extending, Somehow I Kind Of Lose My Bearings.

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

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'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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

I Came To Writing Kind Of Late. I Was An Engineer, And The One Thing I've Learned Is That You Have To Steer A Project In The Direction Of The Maximum Fun For You. You Could Say Lively Energy, Or You Have To Try To Be Intrigued. Basically, If You Were A Musician And You Were Playing Joylessly, Nobody Would Want To Hear You.

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

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

Don't Be Afraid To Be Confused. Try To Remain Permanently Confused. Anything Is Possible. Stay Open, Forever, So Open It Hurts, And Then Open Up Some More, Until The Day You Die, World Without End, Amen.

Anyone Can Be Shamed, But Feeling Guilt Requires Empathy Within.

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

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.

We Try, We Fail, We Posture, We Aspire, We Pontificate - And Then We Age, Shrink, Die, And Vanish.

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

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

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.

I Think It's Basically The Same Game, Although With A Public Figure Like [donald] Trump I Think You Are Bound To Consider The Public Persona Rather Than The Private One. At Least That Was The Case With That Piece Of Writing.

The Millions Or Billions Of Micro Decisions That You're Going To Make, That's What Will Determine Who You Are As A Writer, Not You Deciding In Advance.

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

Vonnegut's War Was Necessary. And Yet It Was Massacre And Screaming And Confusion And Blood And Death. It Was The Mammoth Projection Outward Of The Confused Inner Life Of Men. In War, The Sad Tidy Constructs We Make To Help Us Believe Life Is Orderly And Controllable Are Roughly Thrown Aside Like The Delusions They Are. In War, Love Is Outed As An Insane, Insupportable Emotion, A Kind Of Luxury Emotion, Because Everywhere You Look, Someone Beloved To Someone Is Being Slaughtered, By Someone Whose Own Beloved Has Been Slaughtered, Or Will Be, Or Could Be.

The Most Hopeful Thing In The Stories, I Hope, Is Wit. I Make It Up. If I Make Up A World In Which We're Ruled By Big Talking Turds, It Doesn't Mean That We Are. So You Shouldn't Feel Depressed.

When You Read A Short Story, You Come Out A Little More Aware And A Little More In Love With The World Around You. What I Want Is To Have The Reader Come Out Just 6 Percent More Awake To The World.

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.

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.

Goodbye. I Am Leaving Because I Am Bored.

When I Think About What Fiction Does Morally, I'm Happier Thinking Of A Person Full Of Multiplicities - Sort Of Fragmented.

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

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.

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.

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Michael Clarke Duncan

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