George Saunders

So something in that instant clicked.

And then I was just much more open to sort of what we would now call progressive ideas.

So that kind of magical thing where you – well, for the first time I thought –

Contra Ayn Rand.

These people are the result of a system.

This thing that's happening to them, the way they're behaving, the difficulties they're having, isn't entirely just them.

And that in turn connected with my childhood Catholicism.

Oh, how so?

Well, I mean, I always thought, I always loved, I think it's the woman at the well when Jesus is able to, as I understood it as a kid, comes up to this woman who's scorned by other people and goes, I see you.

And I like you.

I love you.

I forgive you.

I always thought that was such a novelistic move.

And that seems to me part of the magic of fiction because in fiction, I can make a person that I really don't like, like this guy in the book.

He's a stinker.

But then through the kind of weird side door of trying to make the language about him more interesting—

You start sinking through the levels of his stuff.

And pretty soon, I don't know if you like him, like and dislike become a most useless phrase.

You are him.

You have been him.