When I Write I Know That I'm

In The Buddhist Texts, Some Of Them Say, When You Die, Basically That Wild Horse Gets Cut Loose, And The Mind Is Incredibly Powerful And Expansive, Omniscient And Can Go Anywhere And See Anything, But - And This Is The Catch - It's Colored By The Habits Of Thought We Made In Life.

My Theory For Nonfiction Is That Nobody Can Be Free Of Some Kind Of Conceptions About Whatever Story They're Writing. But If You Can Find A Way To Build Those Into The Story, Then The Story Becomes A Process Of Deconstructing And Heightening And Sometimes Changing Those Notions And That Makes Dramatic Tension. The Initial Statement Of Your Position, And Then Letting Reality Act On You To Change It, Is Pretty Good Storytelling.

If You Think Of A Work Of Fiction As A Kind Of Scale Model Of The World, Then The Positive Valences - Where Things Turn Out Better Than You Thought They Would - Ought To Be In There Somewhere, Too.

As Much As We - In A Revisionist Way - Tell Ourselves That We've Always Been A Righteous Country With A Couple Of Swerves Off The Path, We Need To Look Back And See That We've Always Also Been A Racist Country And Have Had A Tendency Towards Banal Aggressiveness. The Thing That's Alarming Is Not So Much That A Few People In America At The Top Are Initiating These Crazy Policies, But That The Middle Is Willing To Go There Too. There's A Strange Movement Of The Middle To This Position Of Banal Aggressiveness.

What Concerns Me Most Is The Horrible Degradation Our Notions Of Truth, Civility, And Decency Have Undergone. Also The Way That Language Has Been Malformed - We Have Been Overcome With Banality And The Cynical Misuse Of Language. When A Candidate Runs A Campaign On A Series Of Dog-whistles To Bigots, Then Turns Around And Talks About "healing The Wounds Of Division," That Is Right Out Of Orwell.