Name: George Saunders On Revisions, Writing For Ghosts, And The Joy Of Reading Fiction In Tough Times
Uploaded: 2026-01-28T17:04:56.000Z
Duration: 8 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The superlative

Ladies and gentlemen, folks of all ages, my next guest is the number one New York Times best selling Booker Prize and National Book Award winning author of 13 books.

Please welcome back to the Late show, George Saunders.

This picture right here, I want to have this in my mind forever.

I wouldn't mind having this one in my mind forever either.

This is the fourth time I've been on here.

And the people that you have on the show from, from the producers, all the technical people, so sweethearted.

And it just makes it such a beautiful experience.

And I know that comes from the top down, so thank you for that.

Well, that's lovely to say and I completely agree.

Incredibly lucky to work with this amazing group of people.

And in November, you were awarded the National Book Foundation's I'm gonna get this right Lifetime achievement prize.

Well, you know, my process is really revision heavy, so.

And in that process, what works for me is to imagine the reader as being kind of better than me, like smarter and more worldly and more compassionate and funnier.

So you're always kind of writing up to that person.

You read something and go, oh, that's kind of dull.

And so over the years of doing that, what will happen is a better version of me will appear on the page, which is so refreshing, you know, I mean, I'm not the usual dummy.

And does that make you want to sort of edit everything you say and do in your life if you know that given another day, yeah, 100% could.

You can even answer that question differently if you'd like.

I'm over here trying to be my best self and hopefully the reader feels that.

And then we both kind of come out of the usual kind of habitual self and have that little moment of kind of like high level union.

So that's really beautiful and addictive.

Right now for a lot of people is a time of enormous stress and turmoil.

And I'm just curious what you think the role of art is in times of growing darkness.

You know, a lot of writers are worried about this, and

I think sometimes you feel like you're doing kind of painting the baseboards, and

But for me, okay, so I want the reader to feel that I'm there with her.

You try to get in touch with some truth that you share.

So I think now it's not a huge thing, but it's not nothing.

We can look at a text, and by doing that, we can recalibrate our relation to truth.

Because this administration seems to be working at a task of lying so often that we get used to it.

It's like if you're in a really fancy restaurant and a waiter brings in three turds on a tray, you know, under a silver dome.

And so in that point, I mean, basic sanity is to say, waiter, you know, let's take this away.

But the idea is, if you keep bringing the turds on a tray, like, okay, leave it.

You know, everyone else seems to be enjoying it.

So in a small way, I feel like things are so confusing and so sad and so cruel, this ambient cruelty.

So for a couple minutes a day, I'm like, yeah, I don't know what I can do, but

I can just recalibrate my relation to truth.

What's the role of fiction in times like this?

Some people say, well, fiction is not good in a time like this because it's a form of escapism.

Well, my experience with fiction is it frees up everything.

You don't have to be accurate to anything except the soul, essentially, you know.

And I think that in itself is really powerful.

And I have the feeling that with fiction, a writer can reach out, and

even if the person is very different from you, you can hit something essential.

I talked to a couple somewhere in my travels, and

they were like mediation people, divorces or corporate problems and stuff.

And they said in the most difficult cases, what they would do is take a Chekhov story and ask the different parties to read it.

And they said it was so amazing, because whatever the real problem was, they didn't need to talk about that.

They were talking about these imaginary people in a story.

And in the process, they said people would become weirdly vulnerable.

They would confess things that in the defensive mode, they wouldn't confess So I think that's, you know, from the time we're little, our parents are telling us a story and we're trying to make sense of the universe through made up things, which somehow frees us from the constraint of the kind of everyday and the habitual, I think.

So, like in fiction, you and I can speak at each other, but

if we're like, say, if we're both reading the same book, for instance, let's say we were all reading Vigil.

So you have one everywhere you go and like that.

But then we're side by side, like facing the story together and experiencing in a similar way.

Which is one of the reasons why even though you've won the Booker Prize and you've won the National Book Award, right now, I'm about to say bestow on you the highest prize any book could possibly get.