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You Didn't Plan To Write A Story; It Just Happened. Well, It Could Be Argued That The Next Thing You Should Do Is Find A Hole To Dig. Right? So You Start Digging A Hole And Then Somebody Brings A Body Along And Puts It In. That's What A Story Must Feel Like To Me. It's Not That You Say, "i Want To Write A Story About A Gravedigger." But You're Walking Along And "i Don't Know What I'm Doing Here In This Story,' And - Boop! A Shovel. "oh, Interesting. Ok, What Does One Do With A Shovel? Digs A Hole. Why? I Don't Know Yet. Dig The Hole! Oh, Look A Body."

-George Saunders

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You Didn't Plan To

George Saunders

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You Didn't Plan To Write A Story; It Just Happened. Well, It Could Be Argued That The Next Thing You Should Do Is Find A Hole To Dig. Right? So You Start Digging A Hole And Then Somebody Brings A Body Along And Puts It In. That's What A Story Must Feel Like To Me. It's Not That You Say, "i Want To Write A Story About A Gravedigger." But You're Walking Along And "i Don't Know What I'm Doing Here In This Story,' And - Boop! A Shovel. "oh, Interesting. Ok, What Does One Do With A Shovel? Digs A Hole. Why? I Don't Know Yet. Dig The Hole! Oh, Look A Body."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Goodbye. I Am Leaving Because I Am Bored.

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A John Updike Is A Once-in-a-generation Phenomenon, If That Generation Is Lucky: So Comfortable In So Many Genres, The Same Lively, Generous Intelligence Suffusing All He Did.

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

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.

Art Is Not Some Inessential Frippery - It Is The Nation's Means Of Intelligently Regarding Itself. To Cripple Or Stigmatize The Arts Is To Doom One's Nation To A Life Of Incuriosity, Dullness, Literalness And The Worst Kind Of Rank Materialism.

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.

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.

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?"

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

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.

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

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

The End Of The Day

In Fact Unrestrained Capitalism Is Quite Cruel And The Cost Is On The Individual Human, On His Or Her Grace.

A Hip-looking Teen Watches An Elderly Woman Hobble Across The Street On A Walker. "grammy's Here!" He Shouts. He Puts Some Macattack Mac&cheese In The Microwave And Dons Headphones And Takes Out A Video Game So He Won't Be Bored During The Forty Seconds It Takes His Lunch To Cook. A Truck Comes Around The Corner And Hits Grammy, Sending Her Flying Over The Roof Into The Backyard, Where Luckily She Lands On A Trampoline. Unluckily, She Bounces Back Over The Roof, Into The Front Yard, Landing On A Rosebush.

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

For Me, The Fiction Writer's Job Is To Take The Small, Stupid Process Of Learning To Use An Iphone - And Suddenly You're The Guy Who's Asking Your Daughter, "when I Go On Facebook, Can It See Me?"

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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 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.

I'm Not A Big Fan Of My Books Going On Cross-country Road Trips. They Get Arrogant And, Next Thing, Start Aspiring To Become 'large-print' Books. I Say, Let Them Stay Home And Be Regular Small-print Books.

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

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.

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

There's This De Facto Assumption That For Something To Have Value, It Has To Be Economically Self-supporting - Which Imposes A Very Low Ceiling On A Culture.

I'm 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm From A Pretty Working-class Background, And I Really Worked Hard In My Life To Eradicate Those Parts Of Myself That Were Stupidly Trapped In That World.those Of Us Who Come Up That Way Made A Series Of Choices To Benefit Ourselves And Make Ourselves More Generous And Open.

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

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

I 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.

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.

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.

I Don't Really Write Beautifully Naturally, Unlike Some People.

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.

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

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

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

It 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.

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 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.

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.

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

She Said America Was A Spoiled Child Ignorant Of Grief.

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."

I Was A Straight Arrow, A Control Freak. I Didn't Do Drugs Or Drink, And This Was The '70s. I Didn't Like The Loss Of Control. Which Isn't Exactly Right, Because I Didn't Know What Happened When You Did Drugs.

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

Irony Is Just Honesty With The Volume Cranked Up.

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.

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

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

I 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.

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.

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

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.

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

There Are Some Things Fundamentally Off About The Stance Of The Book. And Maybe That's Okay; Maybe Every Book Is Flawed, And Great Books, As Flawed As They Might Be, Articulate A Moral Argument That The Reader Then Carries Forward. The Critique To This Model Is, Of Course, To Ask: Should A Book Be Ever So Perfect That You Come Out Of It With Complete Moral Agreement That Can Be Sustained?

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.

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

When You're Embarking On A Piece Of Writing, The Anxiety Is Just Too Much, Especially When You're Young And You're Trying To Figure Out If This Is Your Thing Or Not. You Feel Like, "if I Don't Write A Good Story, I Gotta Get Going To Law School!"

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.

It Seems To Me That There Are Certain Thoughts And Vignettes And Attitudes That I Have Always Had The Desire To Represent.

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

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

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

As The Writer Of This Book [lincoln In The Bardo], What I Loved Was The Feeling Of Having So Many Surprises Come At The End That I Hadn't Really Planned Or Planted.

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.

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.

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.

People Who've Written About Abraham Lincoln's Writing Emphasize How Logical He Was. His Writing Was A Syllogistic Tool. He Would Say, If A, Then B, And He Would Reason Through It. His Late Writing Especially Is So Tight And So Beautifully Reasoned.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

I 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.

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

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

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

"kindness" Can Mean A Lot Of Different Things. In This Case, I Felt I Had To Present His [donald Trump's] Supporters In As Fair A Light As Possible - Many Of Them Hadn't Been Interviewed Before And That Entailed Some Interviewer-courtesy In The Editing And So On.

I Have Nothing. My Model Is I Have Nothing Figured Out, And I'm Starting With Some Little Nugget And Hoping That It Will Talk Back To Me Enough To Let It Grow.

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

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

Fiction Is A Kind Of Compassion-generating Machine That Saves Us From Sloth. Is Life Kind Or Cruel? Yes, Literature Answers. Are People Good Or Bad? You Bet, Says Literature. But Unlike Other Systems Of Knowing, Literature Declines To Eradicate One Truth In Favor Of Another.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

That For Me Was The Big Turning Point In My Artistic Life, When My Wife And I Had Our Kids. The World Got Infused With Morality Again. Every Person In The World Should Theoretically Be Loved As Much As I Love My Daughters.

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