George Saunders

It's interesting because going out into America, I see a fairly...

medium functional culture with pretty good civility.

And the politics doesn't seem to correspond to that.

And I think it may be about this issue of who gets to throw the flag, you know, who gets to, yeah, anyway, that's for the next book.

I got to think about it.

But I was just keeping myself from levitating.

I sometimes have to roll the eyes.

Oh, every—I mean, the whole kindness thing came out of a talk I did at Syracuse, and the point was not—

It's easy.

It's that it's really impossible.

And when I look back at my life, the things I really do regret are the times when I fell out of that in some dramatic way.

So it was never – I was never making the case that I had got it because I really don't.

I'm anxious and I'm sometimes pretty grumpy and I'm also really way too busy.

So that I think –

The secular saint business just, I think it has to do with having decent public manners, actually, in which I was taught in Chicago.

So that part is becoming increasingly, I'm resisting that narrative because it jars with what I know about myself as an actual person.

So to say it's important to be kind does not mean I got it, you know?

I mean, every day.

We have an elderly dog at home who's very sick, you know?

And so that's just an ongoing thing of trying to,