George Saunders: Err in the direction of kindness.

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.

George Saunders

beautiful people thinking

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?

George Saunders

agreement perfect book

I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was a young parent, and something opened in me. That's the highest aspiration.

George Saunders

young-parents eye reading

There are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven't died yet.

George Saunders

havens book years

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.

George Saunders

numbers people thinking

When I think about what fiction does morally, I'm happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities - sort of fragmented.

George Saunders

doe fiction thinking

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.

George Saunders

strange levels book

My artistic approach is that you're supposed to be a little baffled.

George Saunders

artistic

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.

George Saunders

frustration political class

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.

George Saunders

crazy couple country

This whole literary game of trying to put yourself in the shoes of your opponent is good for everybody. It leaves you more open-hearted, it gives you a more accurate vision of the other person, because it's more based on curiosity than projection. In the end if you do have to fight, you're better equipped to fight. Also it doesn't leave you damaged at the end, it doesn't leave you hateful or malformed by your own anger.

George Saunders

shoes fighting games

When you're out there in America, meeting with regular people, it's a pretty mellow, relaxed, kind-hearted country. The direction from the top, from the President, is following mean-spirited tendencies: fear and undue caution and distrust of the other, so it's very depressing.

George Saunders

depressing mean country

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.

George Saunders

presence-of-mind fighting thinking

What evil does first in the world, maybe, is distract us from our pursuit of goodness.

George Saunders

evil doe firsts

Our first responsibility in all things is to preserve our goodness of heart - then and only then act.

George Saunders

responsibility heart firsts

I try to keep my artistic opinions not so much "to myself" but "on myself."

George Saunders

artistic opinion trying

As one gets older, this question of death, becomes more vexing and urgent.

George Saunders

urgent

In fiction, conceptualizing, I've found, produces dull and over-controlled text.

George Saunders

produce dull fiction

So much of what I am doing in my fiction is just trying to get into interesting places in terms of language or form, places that don't bore me. And this happens via hundreds of quick micro-decisions that are done "to taste," so to speak. So the experience is one of groping toward that interesting place - trying to leap away from anything that seems boring, or about which I don't have strong opinions. Essentially trying to avoid that moment where, devoid of any strong feeling, I start conceptualizing.

George Saunders

strong decision interesting

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.

George Saunders

writing night ideas