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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.

-George Saunders

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With Fiction, And Also

George Saunders

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Do Not Really Like Rich People, As They Make Us Poor People Feel Dopey And Inadequate. Not That We Are Poor. I Would Say We Are Middle. We Are Very, Very Lucky. I Know That. But Still, It Is Not Right That Rich People Make Us Middle People Feel Dopey And Inadequate.

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?

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.

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.

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?"

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).

It's Funny With Fiction - Once You Cut Something, It Hasn't Happened Anymore.

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.

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.

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.

From The Beginning [of The Lincoln In The Bardo], I Actually Had It In Mind Not To Write A Novel. I'd Kind Of Gotten Past That Point Where I Felt Bad For Never Having Written A Novel, Even To Where I Felt Really Good About It, Like I Was A Real Purist.

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.

I Think Kindness Is A Sort Of Gateway Virtue - Having That Simple Aspiration Can Get You Into Deep Water Very Quickly - In A Good Way.

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

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.

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.

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

Monologue Is The Most Honest Way To Represent Human Beings.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

[reading Swing Time] Made Me A Feel A Little Bit Like When I Used To Read David [foster] Wallace. Like, "i Can't Play That Game. I Wish I Could, But I Can't Do It."

I Find That The Great Artists I've Met Are People Who Are So Playfully Invested In Their Process That, Even If It Doesn't Come Out The Way They Like, They Still Power Through And Even Take Energy From It.

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

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

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?".

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

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.

The Main Thing A Childhood In The Church Did For Me, I Think, Was Set Up The Universe As A Moral System. Once You've Seen It That Way, It Always Seems That Way.

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

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.

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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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.

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

My Go-to Default Is To Try To Be Nice, Which I Feel Does Less Harm In The Long Run Than Trying To Be, Say, Assertive. If I Am Nice And Maybe Too Passive, I Find That Easier To Live With.

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

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.

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.

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

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 Think The Biggest Single Issue Is Income Inequity And What This Is Doing To The Good Old "american Dream." This And Corporatism - This Delusional Idea That "shareholder Value" Outweighs Everything Else.

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

In A Sense My Whole Life As A Writer Is Trying To Find Structural Ways, Or Formal Ways, To Permit That Outflowing So It Doesn't Just Look Like Crazy Output. In Other Words, If It Turns Out That You Can Do A Given Voice, That's Just Kind Of Inclination. But Then If You Can Find A Way To Put That Voice In A Story So That The Voice Serves A Purpose, Then I Would Say That's Being A Writer.

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

The Writer Has To Make Pleasure For The Reader - Which, I Think, Is Done By Taking One's Character's Seriously And Taking One's Readers Seriously -don't Condescend Or Try To Be Tricky. Be A Friend To Your Reader - I'd Say That's A Pretty Good First Step.

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.

I Don't Really Do Much Social Media. I Just Don't Like It That Much. I've Trained Myself To Write Very Slowly For A Lot Of Money So It Really Galls Me To Write Quickly For Free.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I Think Something That I Can't Name About Our Media Has Made Us Move Away From That Kind Of Specificity And That Kind Of Curiosity.

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.

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.

I Sometimes Think That I Can't Do The Bigger Thing That [zadie Smith] Do So Beautifully, As In Swing Time, With So Much World In It And So Much Rapturous Paint Thrown Around. I Don't Think It Would Be Possible To Write A Book On That Scale With As Much Ocd As I Have.

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.

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.

When I Was A Kid, I Took 'the Brady Bunch' And 'the Partridge Family' Very Seriously. It Was A World To Me In The Same Way That The Greek Myths Would Have Been Had I Read Them. You Know, Marcia Is Athena And Mr. Brady Is Zeus.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Irony Is Just Honesty With The Volume Cranked Up.

A Culture's Ability To Understand The World And Itself Is Critical To Its Survival. But Today We Are Led Into The Arena Of Public Debate By Seers Whose Main Gift Is Their Ability To Compel People To Continue To Watch Them.

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.

I Feel That There Is Nothing That Can Happen To A Person That Is Banal. Everything That Happens To Us Is Interesting.

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.

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.

As Flannery O'connor Says, A Person Can Choose What She Writes But She Can't Choose What She Makes Live. Some People Are Really Acoustic Writers And So For Them The Secret Revision Is Sound. Other People May Revise In Terms Of The Way A Paragraph Feels. There's A Million Ways To Do It.

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

We Have Not Been Energetic Enough - White People Haven't - In Pursuing Racial Equity.

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

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?

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.

I'm Not A Natural Criticizer - I Prefer To Like And Praise And So On.

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."

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

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.

Presence Of Mind

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.

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

This - Where We Are Now - Is Where A Culture Gets To, When It Has Chosen, For Many Years, Banality Over Intelligence, The Literal Over The Immaterial Or Complex, Materialism Over Spirituality. This Is The Result Of Many Years Of Disrespecting The Intellectual Project - Of A Collective Acceptance Of The Idea That Thinking And Reasoning And Reading Deeply In Difficult Text And Being Respectful Of History Are Somehow "wimpy" Or Secondary.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

I Attended Catholic School. We Received A Great Education From The Nuns. ... Also, Guilt. Guilt And A Feeling Of Never Being Satisfied With What You've Done. And A Sense That You Are Inadequate And A Big Phony. All Useful For A Writer. I'm Always Being Edited By My Inner Nun.

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

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.

My Theory For Nonfiction Is That Nobody Can Be Free Of Some Kind Of Conceptions About Whatever Story They're Writing. But If You Can Find A Way To Build Those Into The Story, Then The Story Becomes A Process Of Deconstructing And Heightening And Sometimes Changing Those Notions And That Makes Dramatic Tension. The Initial Statement Of Your Position, And Then Letting Reality Act On You To Change It, Is Pretty Good Storytelling.

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.

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.

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.

He Was A Father. That's What A Father Does.eases The Burdens Of Those He Loves. Saves The Ones He Loves From Painful Last Images That Might Endure For A Lifetime.

Nostalgia Is, 'hey, Remember The Other Mall That Used To Be There?'

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

...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 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.

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.

That Seems To Be The Definition Of 'novel' For Me: A Story That Hasn't Yet Discovered A Way To Be Brief.

Maybe You Could Even Think 100,000 People Are Inside Each Human Being. And You Drop A Novel On That Person, And A Certain Number Of Those Sub-people Come Alive Or Get Reenergized For Some Finite Time.

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.

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

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

I'm Comfortable With Anything After The Fact.

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.

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.

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.

The Bottom Line For Me Is That Life Is Short And Art Is Long.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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

I Don't Know About Transformation. But Scientifically You Can Say: Well, It Doesn't Seem To Hurt Anybody. Personally I've Been Cheered By Books At Really Critical Moments. That Much I Believe.

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

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.

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.

What Good The Prophet In The Wilderness May Do Is Incremental And Personal. It's Good For Us To Hear Someone Speak The Irrational Truth. It's Good For Us When, In Spite Of All Of The Sober, Pragmatic, And Even Correct Arguments That War Is Sometimes Necessary Someone Says: War Is Large-scale Murder, Us At Our Worst, The Stupidest Guy Doing The Cruelest Thing To The Weakest Being.

Slaughterhouse Five

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.

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

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

The Internet Kind Of Feels Like Happiness Sometimes, However. It Feels Like Stimulation.

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.

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.

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 Think The Path For A Young Writer Might Be One That Says, "i Have To Accept Myself, This Is What I Am. I Can't Eradicate My Defects. I Can Work On Them."

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

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.

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

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

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.

Someone Told Me Once - I Mean I Said, "is It Ok That I Don't Really Know What The Three-act Structure Is?" And He Said, "it's Basically: Act 1: A Guy Climbs Up A Tree; Act 2: People Come And Throw Stuff At Him; Act 3: He Gets Down."

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Err In The Direction Of Kindness.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Story Sometimes Writes You Into A Corner.

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.

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.

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.

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

Whole Swaths Of The Book [lincoln In The Bardo] Are Made Up Of Verbatim Quotes From Various Historical Sources, Which I Cut Up And Rearranged To Form Part Of The Narrative.

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

If I Go To The Coffee Shop And Have A Nice Interaction With The Barista, I Don't Know What That Does For World Peace, But We Have To Assume That In The Great Basket Of Goodness Maybe That's One Little Micron Or One Little Neutron That You've Put In There.

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.

As A Kid, I Had A Real Fascination With Perverse, Off-color, And Kind Of Risky Things, And I Also Had A Very Sanctimonious Catholic, Purist Side.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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