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

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

Understanding the Quote: "whatever you love, that will be an influence. it just will. so..."

This quote by George Saunders reflects deeply on the theme of jobs. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Jobs, Stuff, Young Writers, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

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

Lessons From the Quote

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

About George Saunders

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

Actionable Takeaways

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

Closing Thoughts

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

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Jobs
Stuff
Young Writers
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From The Perspective Of Someone With Two Grown And Wonderful Kids, That Your Instincts As Parents Are Correct: A Minute Spent Reading To Your Kids Now Will Repay Itself A Million-fold Later, Not Only Because They Love You For Reading To Them, But Also Because, Years Later, When They’re Gone And Miles Away, Those Quiet Evenings, When You Were Tucked In With Them, Everything Quiet But The Sound Of The Page-turns, Will, Seem To You, I Promise...... Sacred.
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I'm A Control Freak. I'm Defensive. And I'm An Egomaniac. That's True About Me.
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The Idea Of Inclusion Has Become Kind Of A Stone That We've Passed Our Hand Over So Many Times That It Doesn't Mean Anything.
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I've Always Wanted To Write Energetic, Atypical Sentences, I.e., Sentences That Were Not Normal Or Bland.
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If I Find Myself Being Too Earnest And Sentimental And Hyperbolic And Simplistic, Which Is Definitely A Tendency I Have, Then I Bring In This Perverse Henchman.
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There Was One Sequence Of Days [making Lincoln In The Bardo] When I Had Halfway Decided To Use The Historical Nuggets, But I Wasn't Quite Sure It Would Work. I'd Be In My Room For Six Or Seven Hours, Cutting Up Bits Of Paper With Quotes And Arranging Them On The Floor, With This Little Voice In My Head Saying, "hey, This Isn't Writing!" But At The End Of That Day, I Felt That The Resulting Section Was Doing Important Emotional Work
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Success Makes Opportunities And So Many Of Those "opportunities" Are Actually Exemptions - From Hardship, From Unfriendliness, From Struggle.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Axes
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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.
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I Guess What I'm Trying To Say Is That Whatever Weirdness Was Going To Be In There, I Felt, Had To Be Earned. And It Had To Be Required By The Emotional Needs Of The Book.
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I'm A Liberal And I'm Left Of Gandhi And I Don't Like Trump.
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All Traditions Are Also Full Of Meanness For The Sake Of Meanness.
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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.
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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.
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...smile First, Then Speak.
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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.
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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.
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Err In The Direction Of Kindness.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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A Work Of Art Is Something Produced By A Person, But Is Not That Person — It Is Of Her, But Is Not Her. It’s A Reach, Really — The Artist Is Trying To Inhabit, Temporarily, A More Compact, Distilled, Efficient, Wittier, More True-seeing, Precise Version Of Herself — One That She Can’t Replicate In So-called ‘real’ Life, No Matter How Hard She Tries. That’s Why She Writes: To Try And Briefly Be More Than She Truly Is.
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Writing
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I'm Turning 58, And You Get That Kind Of Weird, Old-guy Feeling Of You Don't Have An Infinite Number Of Years Left And If There's Anything You Want To Say Or Represent, It's Time To Try It.
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I Still Believe That Capitalism Is Too Harsh And I Believe That, Even Within That, There Is A Lot Of Satisfaction And Beauty If You Happen To Be One Of The Lucky Ones, Although That Doesn't Eradicate The Reality Of The Suffering. It's All True At Once, Kind Of Humming And Sublime.
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Reality
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Decision
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.
Writing
People
Sloth
One Of The Revelations In That Book [lincoln In The Bardo] For Me Was This Idea About Citizenship. Even That Word - Citizenship - For Someone My Age, It Makes Me Cringe. But, To Me, The Political Space We're In Now Argues For A Reboot Of Fairly Simple Ideas And The Examination Of The Way That Americans Have Not Been Living Into Them.
Book
Simple
Ideas
I 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.
Blow
Giving
Holes
So, Good News/bad News: Good News That I'm Progressing; Bad News That Life Is Short And Art Is Long.
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Life Is Short
Long
Irony Is Just Honesty With The Volume Cranked Up.
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Irony
Honest
I Think The Wave Of Social Media Rejection Is Coming. I Think There Will Be A Big Reaction Against It. It's Just Like Sugar- - Mean, I Loved It As A Kid.
Mean
Kids
Thinking
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.
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Believe
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Honestly, The Choice Is: I Can Be A Cheerful Person, More Awake To Correction, More Of A Force For Good ... When I'm Writing. Or I Can Be The Opposite Of All Those Things, When I'm Not Writing.
Writing
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One Of The Ideas That Runs Through This Book [lincoln In The Bardo] Is This Buddhist Notion That The Mind Is Incredibly Powerful; Not The Brain But The Mind.
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If You Have A Friend, What's The Best Way You Can Experience Her Beauty? It's To Really Accept Her. She's Weird In This Way, I Accept It. She's Hard To Talk To, I Accept It. Then That Person Eventually Will Come All The Way Out Into The Sun. I Think It's The Same Way With Our Talent. We Say, "look, I'm Not Going To Judge You. I'm Going To Try To Use You In The Very Best Way."
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Judging
Trying
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.
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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.
Dark
People
Age
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.
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Media
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I'm Always Nice When I Do Drugs. But, You Know, I'm Nicer On The Drug Called "writing."
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Writing
Drug
A Person Supporting [donald]trump Likes Trump. And I Think They Would Say The Same About Me.
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Likes
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I Think This Is The Other Big Issue That Is Not Going Away: Do We Really Believe That Bit In The Constitution Or Not? I Think We Do.
Believe
Thinking
Issues
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.
Strong
Nice
Eye
My Heart Goes Out To Him. Sort Of. Because Empathy Depends On How You've Spent Your Day.
Heart
Empathy
My Heart
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.
Writing
Thinking
Failing
I Know What It Feels Like To Be In That Middle And Lower-middle Class, And Feel Like The Culture Is Passing You By; It Translates Into A Great Sense Of Personal Frustration That Can Then Morph Into Political Frustration.
Frustration
Class
Political
I Think About How I Conceptualize The Audience. The Trick Is That They've Got To Be Smarter And More Worldly Than Me. So As I'm Revising, I'm Keeping That In Mind. I Cannot Condescend, Even A Little Bit. Every Single Choice That I Make Is Motivated By That.
Thinking
Choices
Mind
My Artistic Approach Is That You're Supposed To Be A Little Baffled.
Artistic
There Are Books That I Read Years Ago That Enlivened Things In Me That Haven't Died Yet.
Book
Years
Havens
With Non-fiction Writing I Feel Like I'm Confined And Driven By What Actually Happened. That Makes The "plot". So It's A Process Of Getting All Of My Notes Typed Up, Then Scanning Through The Notes, Trying To Extract Or Find Certain Vignettes That Seem Like They Might Write Well - That Might Have A Potential For Good Energy, Shape, Etc. And Then At Some Point I Start Stringing These Together, Keeping An Eye On The Word Count.
Eye
Writing
Trying
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.
Real
Mean
Accomplishment
Goodbye. I Am Leaving Because I Am Bored.
Goodbye
Crazy
Mad
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.
Political
Groups
Consideration
While Writing This Book [lincoln In The Bardo], [idea Of Inclusion] Occurred To Me, You Either Believe In The Constitution Or You Don't. If You Do, It's Intense In What It Wants Of Us.
Believe
Book
Writing
Whenever You Talk About Writing I Think You Have To Remember That It All Has A Big Question Mark Over It - Every Word Has A Big Question Mark Over It.
Writing
Thinking
Remember
Writing And Reading And Speaking With Specificity And Skill Has Never Seen More Important To Me Than It Does At This Moment. It's What's Between Us And Chaos.
Reading
Writing
Skills
If You Want To Explore A Political Idea In The Highest Possible Way, You Embody It In The Personal, Because That's Something That No One Can Deny.
Ideas
Political
Want
Fiction Is Open To Whoever Comes In The Door, As Long As You Come In Energetically.
Doors
Long
Fiction
Chekhov - Shall I Be Blunt? - Is The Greatest Short Story Writer Who Ever Lived.
Story Writers
Stories
Chekhov
If You Really Think Back To The Great Writers, There's A Lot Of Happiness In Tolstoy; There's A Lot Of Love, There's Childbirth, And There's Dances. And Likewise In Shakespeare And Even Cervantes, There's A Lot Of Celebrations Of The Positive Manifestations Of Life. Technically, I Found It Harder To Do, So That's Kind Of A Good Late-life Challenge - Without Getting Sentimental Or Chirpy.
Thinking
Challenges
Sentimental
I Keep Thinking Of Robert Stone Making The Distinction Between The Word Sublime And The Word Beautiful. He Described Being In A Battle As Sublime. Because Even Though People Were Dying, It Was Such A Huge Sensory Experience That It Became Sublime.
Beautiful
Thinking
People
We've Got A Real Problem With Social Media That We Didn't Know We Were Going To Have. It's Almost Like The Demons Have Gotten Out Of The Box.
Real
Media
Problem
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.
Moving
Pieces
Anti Love
Whether You're Eighteen Or Sixty, In A Certain Way, Whatever You Know Is Valid.
Way
Certain
Eighteen
I'm Comfortable With Anything After The Fact.
Facts
Comfortable
When Somebody You've Known For 20 Years, And With Whom You Have A Full Context, Winks At You Or Whatever, It Can Be Huge. I Think In A Sense What You're Trying To Re-create In Fiction Is That.
Thinking
Years
Trying
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.
Running
Crazy
Nice
Our First Responsibility In All Things Is To Preserve Our Goodness Of Heart - Then And Only Then Act.
Responsibility
Heart
Firsts
I Don't Mind Being Criticized Intelligently; Although I Don't Love It.
Mind
I'm A Big Lover Of America. I Love The People, But Also The Weird Berms, The Strange Little High Schools Tucked Away In Different Places, And Just The Whole Geography And The Psycho­logical Apparatus Of Americans.
School
America
People
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.
Acceptance
Emotional
Self
Equality Has Always Been Extant But Some Of Us Just Didn't Know It.
Knows
I'm Very Happy - If I Can Do Even A Little Bit Of Work To Get The Short Story Out More, I'm Thrilled.
Stories
Littles
Short Story
For Me, Things Were Either Very Sullied Or Very Pure, Very Controlled Or Very Under-controlled.
Controlled
Pure
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.
Trying
Be Kind
Truthful
A Writer Writes What Interests Him And What He Can Manage, And What He Can Make Live, As Flannery O'connor Said. So My Reaction To Someone Saying "you Must!" Or "you Should!" Or Even "hey, Why Don't You?" Is Basically To Sort Of Shrug And Politely Walk Off And Do Whatever I Want To Do. It's Nobody Else's Business, Really, And Even If I Happened To Agree With One Of Those "musts" Or "shoulds" What Would I Do About It, If My Heart Wasn't In It?
Writing
Heart
Hey
As One Gets Older, This Question Of Death, Becomes More Vexing And Urgent.
Urgent
She Said America Was A Spoiled Child Ignorant Of Grief.
Children
Grief
America
Success Is Like A Mountain In Front Of You That Keeps Growing. If You're Not Careful, It Will Take Up Your Whole Life.
Mountain
Growing
Whole Life
When You Talk About A Reader Being Emotionally Moved, A Feeling Of Empathy, I Think That Comes Out Of That Line-by-line Respect For Reader. That's Actually Where It All Comes From.
Thinking
Empathy
Feelings
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.
Art
Real
Black
Just Through The Process Of Trying To Make The Living And The Dead Feel Real, All These Little Benefits Came Out. And These Benefits Turned Out To Be Much More Articulate Statements Of What I Really Believe. And Somehow They Were More Convincing Because They Were Arrived At At Such Length.
Real
Believe
Trying
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.
Size
Looks
Pace
The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me Is That Nothing Happened In Writing. I Ended Up Working For Engineering Companies, And That's Where I Found My Material, In The Everyday Struggle Between Capitalism And Grace. Being Broke And Tired, You Don't Come Home Your Best Self.
Struggle
Writing
Tired
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.
Wind
Stories
Littles
I Remember Reading The Bluest Eye When I Was A Young Parent, And Something Opened In Me. That's The Highest Aspiration.
Reading
Eye
Young Parents
I Say Yes To The Hot Bath And The Sandwich - To Getting Ourselves Into The Best Possible Mental Shape To Identify And Then Fight The Necessary Fights From The Best Possible Mind-state: Calm, Loving, Affectionate, Precise. Not Pushovers But Also Not Zealots. With The Idea In Mind That "our Enemies" Are Not Our Enemies; They Might Seem Like That In Their Present Form But That Form Can Morph. We Really Are Large, And Really Do Contain Multitudes. But I Think It All Has To Start With A Kindly Presence Of Mind, And The Aspiration To Affection For Others.
Fighting
Thinking
Presence Of Mind
What A Powerful Thing To Know: That One's Own Desires Are Mappable Onto Strangers; That What One Finds In Oneself Will Most Certainly Be Found In The Other.
Powerful
Desire
Stranger
I Was A Big And Un-ironic Fan Of Dear Abby When I Was A Kid In Chicago. I Think I Sort Of Internalized Her. So I Have This Inner Abby: Cranky, Proper, Folksy Yet Scathing, With A Beehive Hairdo. But That's My Issue.
Kids
Thinking
Issues
If You Start With The Idea That You Are Going To Be Writing About A Night In A Graveyard, And That There Are Only A Few Living People In That Frame, All Sorts Of Interesting And Difficult Technical Problems Arise. And Then Form - New Form, Or Experimental Form - Might Be Understood As Just Trying To Tell That Story Most Movingly And Efficiently.
Writing
Night
Ideas
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.
Kind
Hungry
Whatever Happens When We Die, It Would Be Really Weird If It Was What We Had Expected. Even If You Were A Lifelong Christian Believer, It Would Be Kind Of Weird If There Actually Were Pearly Gates.
Christian
Would Be
Be Kind
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.
Data
Troops
Doe
In The Moment Of Reading, The Writer Comes Up To The Surface And The Reader Comes Up To The Surface And They Kiss, Like Two Fish. That Actually Does Happen.
Reading
Kissing
Two
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.
Thinking
People
Information
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.
Thinking
Media
Insane
Positive Human Action Is Not Only Possible, But Pervasive; Human Beings Can Improve And Choose Light And So On. And This Is All Happening.
Light
Action
Humans
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.
Fear
Mistake
People
It's A Time When A Lot Of Principle Virtues Are Being Tested. Do We Still Believe In The Truth? Do We Still Believe In Empathy? Do We Still Believe The Protection Of The Weakest Among Us? These Are Yes Or No Questions, But The Means Of Communication Is All Tied Up With Those Virtues And You Can't Abandon Those Virtues As You Pursue Them.
Believe
Communication
Mean
There's This De Facto Assumption That For Something To Have Value, It Has To Be Economically Self-supporting - Which Imposes A Very Low Ceiling On A Culture.
Self
Ceilings
Culture
I Have This Tendency To Take A Little Bit Of Questionable Knowledge And Riff On It.
Littles
Tendencies
Questionable
I Started Out In Engineering. I Was A Geophysical Engineer. Throughout The Course Of My Life I've Done A Lot Of Strange Jobs, And The Effect Has Been To Make Me Think A Little More Skeptically About Our Capitalist Society.
Jobs
Thinking
Engineering
I 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.
Powerful
Thinking
Legacy
I Was, Not An Altar Boy, But A Reader Of The Epistle, And I Walked In On A Nun And A Priest Furiously French Kissing When I Was In Seventh Grade. I Walked In, Saw It, And Went, "no Way," Backed Out, Composed Myself, And Went Back In, And It Was Still Going On. And The Experience Of Seeing That Was Actually Very Deep.
Kissing
Boys
Way
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.
Real
Past
Emotional
My Mind Goes Really Quickly And I Tend To Talk Really Fast, As You've Probably Heard, I Sometimes Lose Track Of My Syntax, As I'm Talking That Fast. The Only Thing I Try To Do, Well, It's Slow Down, But Also I Do Something When I'm Reading That's Similar To When I'm Writing A Section, Which Is To Really Try To Imagine You On The Other Side, In A Certain Way, As An Intelligent, Sympathetic Presence Who's Rooting For Me To Tell You A Good Story.
Reading
Writing
Intelligent
An Artist's Job Is To Be Interested In Things As They Are.
Jobs
Artist
I Read Rand And Thought, "i Want To Be One Of The Earth Movers, The Scientific People Who Power The World. I Don't Want To Be One Of These Lisping Liberal Artsy Leeches." So I Was Working Against My Actual Abilities.
People
Leeches
World
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.
Stories
World
Want
It Blew My Mind, Reading Swing Time, That I Could Take Any Sentence In The Book, And It Was One Of The Most Beautiful Sentences Written In English.
Beautiful
Reading
Book
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.
Character
Adversity
Want
I'm Repledging Myself To Human-scale Values. As A Fiction Writer, The Best Data Comes Through The Senses And Is Then Processed Through Many Revisions. We Have To Learn To Be Intelligent Assessors Of The Data Coming In To Us And What It's Doing To Our Mental Process.
Intelligent
Data
Fiction
Humor Is What Happens When We're Told The Truth Quicker And More Directly Than We're Used To.
Writing
Used
Happens
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
Grandmother
Flirting
Lunch
Both [donald] Trump And Bernie [sanders] Got To This Idea Of The Vanishing Middle Class Sooner And With More Passion Than More Mainstream Politicians, And Benefited From It. The Difference, Of Course, Is That Bernie Understood This In A More Compassionate Framework, And Talked About It In Conjunction With A Revitalization Of Another Part Of The American Project, Which Is The Notion That We Are All Created Equal, And That Our Laws And Culture And Action Ought To Reflect That.
Passion
Law
Class
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.
Always Trying
Fiction
Littles
It Seemed To Me, In Some Way, Especially When You're Looking Back At Distant Historical Events, The "truth" With A Capital "t" Is Kind Of The Juxtaposition Of All The Many, Many, Many Truths That Seem True To People At The Time.
People
Historical
Kind
I'm Such A Baby If I Even Get A Flu.
Baby
Flu
Ifs
More And More These Days What I Find Myself Doing In My Stories Is Making A Representation Of Goodness And A Representation Of Evil And Then Having Those Two Run At Each Other Full-speed, Like A Couple Of Peewee Football Players, To See What Happens. Who Stays Standing? Whose Helmet Goes Flying Off?
Football
Running
Couple
It's On Us To Investigate Ourselves For Any Lingering Sense That We Are 'giving' Equality. We Are Not. It Is Already Given. And Not By Us.
Giving
Given
Lingering
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.
Trying
Stories
Firsts
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.
Higher Ground
Luck
Needs
When I Write I Know That I'm Going To Have To Produce 40 Percent More Than I Need.
Writing
Needs
Produce
Ralph Kramden, As Played By Jackie Gleason, Was This Big Bumbling New York City Bus Driver Who Was Kind Of Mean And Crass And A Little Bit Egotistical. But Underneath It All, He Was A Big Heart Looking For A Place To Land I Think.
New York
Mean
Heart
I Was Raised Catholic,i Took From That Was A Sense Of Theater And Drama, And Also The Idea That There Were Truths That Couldn't Actually Be Uttered Directly But Really Had To Be Reached Through Ritual. You Come Out Of Those Masses So Moved, And You're Like, "why Did That Happen?" And The Truth Of It Is That It Happened Through An Hour Of Highly Enacted Ritual.
Drama
Ideas
Catholic
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.
Trying
Depth
Stories
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.
Fun
Writing
Trying
I've Seen Time And Time Again The Way That The Process Of Trying To Say Something Dignifies And Improves A Person.
Trying
Way
Process
At Times, They're So Right And I'm So Left, We Agree.
Agree
Left
In Fact Unrestrained Capitalism Is Quite Cruel And The Cost Is On The Individual Human, On His Or Her Grace.
Grace
Cost
Facts
In A Certain Way, We're Always Toggling Back And Forth Between The Absolute And The Relative, If That Makes Sense.
Way
Back And Forth
Certain
It Was That Impossible Thing: Happiness That Does Not Wilt To Reveal The Thin Shoots Of Some New Desire Rising From Within It.
Impossible Things
Desire
Doe
I Am Trying To Remember That Things Have Certainly Been Crazier In Human History And They May Get Crazier Here And Now, And [here I Am Trying To Be Optimistic] It's Even A Good Thing, To Be Going Through All Of This, If Only To Be Reminded That History Hasn't Stopped - Human Existence Is As Fundamentally Unmanageable Now As It Ever Was.
Optimistic
Here I Am
Trying
Whatever You Love, That Will Be An Influence. It Just Will. So In Effect The Young Writer's Job Is: Go Out And Find Some Stuff To Love.
Jobs
Stuff
Young Writers
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.
Thinking
Years
Fiction
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.
Buddhist
Horse
Powerful
There's Also A Way That You Have Of Being Precise But Also Allusive, That Works Well For Me - It's Something About The Open-hearted Way You Frame Your Queries. Instead Of Feeling Daunted Or Discouraged, I Feel Excited To Give Whatever It Is A Try. This Takes A Lot Of Editorial Wisdom And Confidence - To Know Just How To Get The Writer To Take That Extra Chance.
Giving
Feelings
Trying
I Have Finally Realized That, You Know, It's Not A Given That My Lifespan Will Accommodate My Writing Aspirations.
Writing
Given
Aspiration
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.
Anxiety
Relax
Stories
I Actually Do Believe In Life After Death.
Believe
Life After Death
After Death
I Think That Fiction Has A Part To Play In Urging Us, As A Species, Toward Compassion.
Thinking
Compassion
Play
We Have Not Been Energetic Enough - White People Haven't - In Pursuing Racial Equity.
White
People
Enough
It's One Thing To Be A Perfectionist When You're Alone, But When You're Trying To Make It Work In An Ensemble That's A Whole Different Deal.
Trying
Different
Ensemble
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).
Real
Believe
Mean
I Have Been Married To My Wife, Paula, For 25 Years. We Have Wonderful Kids. Things Are - It's Been A Really Rich Life, So I Started Thinking, Is There A Way To Get Valence A Little More Into The Stories, The Idea That, Yes, Things Can Go Wrong, But Also They Can Go Right.
Kids
Thinking
Years
You Go To The Marketplace And There Are Seventeen Consciousnesses Moving In And Out. Sometimes You Want The Same Shirt That I Want, And Our Thought Bubbles Collide A Bit And That Makes Plot.
Moving
Plot
Want
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.
Hoboken
Imitating
Knows
Early On, A Story's Meaning And Rationale Seem Pretty Obvious, But Then, As I Write It, I Realize That I Know The Meaning/rationale Too Well, Which Means That The Reader Will Also Know It - And So Things Have To Be Ramped Up.
Writing
Mean
Stories
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.
Creative
Vision
Might
As A Fiction Writer, One Of Things You Learn Is God Lives In Specificity. You Know, Human Kindness Is Increased As We Pursue Specificity.
Kindness
Fiction
God Life
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.
Writing
Ideas
Trying
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