George Saunders

What she's doing is saying, it's fine.

Whatever you did is fine.

Just leave the self and all is forgiven.

It's kind of my point of view, but as I wrote the book, I got more and more skeptical about it as I examined it.

There's a guy in the book called The Frenchman.

His point of view is bullshit.

Don't give me that.

You know, when that guy was alive, somebody could have kicked his butt enough to get him to be more of quantity X. So he's urging her to get after Boone and do whatever's necessary to get him in relation to truth.

The Frenchman's saying he's still breathing.

So you have a chance, if you approach it skillfully, to put him in alignment with truth.

And that's where the salvation would come from.

Even though he can't move, he's never going to move again.

If his mind could be correctly aligned, you saved him.

Do you believe in free will?

Depends where you put the point of view.

At this moment, I mean, in terms of like, I don't know what I'm going to do when I leave here.

That feels like free will.

I think if you could run the whole clock of reality from the beginning, you'd see that the decision I made was, of course, pre-encoded by everything that came before.

So the book was me kind of looking at that question.

And I don't know, I mean, except move the point of view around.