George Saunders

It's easier, yeah.

Or, you know, there's also, I mean, isn't it a drag to have to say in a scolding tone,

I don't do that.

Or that strikes me as low.

I think maybe starting back with reality TV, we lost our ability to say, that's toxic and I don't want it.

And so we say, well, it's toxic, but I'm not going to be a prig.

Does that resonate with you at all?

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.