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.
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.
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.
To me, the process of writing is just reading what I've written and - like running your hand over one of those mod glass stovetops to find where the heat is - looking for where the energy is in the prose, then going in the direction of that. It's an exercise in being open to whatever is there.
My general approach to writing fiction is that you try to have as few conceptual notions as possible and you just respond to the energy that the story is making rather than having a big over plan. I think if you have a big over plan, the danger is that you might just take your plan and then you bore everybody. I always joke that it's like going on a date with index cards. You know, at 7:30 p.m. I should ask about her mother. You keep all the control to yourself but you are kind of insulting to the other person.
I'm a liberal and I'm left of Gandhi and I don't like Trump.
The great American denial riff is that you can do whatever you like and you always triumph at the end. The world is saying no, you can do what you like, but there are consequences. And maturity is to be able to turn to the consequences and accept them.
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.
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 think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time.
All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.
A country doesn't need a businessman to run it: it needs a heartful, worldly, compassionate leader.
An artist's job is to be interested in things as they are.
The most hopeful thing in the stories, I hope, is wit. I make it up. If I make up a world in which we're ruled by big talking turds, it doesn't mean that we are. So you shouldn't feel depressed.
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.
In fiction, conceptualizing, I've found, produces dull and over-controlled text.
As one gets older, this question of death, becomes more vexing and urgent.
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.
The internet kind of feels like happiness sometimes, however. It feels like stimulation.
All traditions are also full of meanness for the sake of meanness.
As a fiction writer, one of things you learn is God lives in specificity. You know, human kindness is increased as we pursue specificity.
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.
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.
"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 think it's basically the same game, although with a public figure like [Donald] Trump I think you are bound to consider the public persona rather than the private one. At least that was the case with that piece of writing.
