Viet Thanh Nguyen

Many beautiful things like art that are made by people and people...

mess these beautiful things up.

There's nothing that human beings have invented, nothing beautiful that they haven't also messed up at the same time.

And that's the paradox of being human.

We create beautiful things and we also undermine them by the institutions that we create.

And so I realized about that, about writing and about art, which were my things that I really cared about a lot, that the writing and the art matter.

Everything else around them do not.

Publishing, awards, recognitions, fancy dinners, interviews, these kinds of things.

I mean, they're fun, but they don't matter.

Oh, you're crushing me.

We're having a good time.

That's important.

We need it, right?

And it's a good time to go to a dinner party or a literary party or whatever, but it's not the art.

It's not the writing.

And so it took 17 years of working at the art to realize I didn't care about the illusions.

And that's a very beneficial experience to have.

And again, there's no way to teach anybody.

Yeah, because you look around, and I looked around after 17 years, and I realized, oh, the things that I thought I cared about, like, will I get published in The New Yorker?

Or will I get this fancy prize?