In January, a New York Times profile announced that your new short-story collection Tenth of December was the best book we'll read all year. How did you feel about that?

Pretty good. Maybe I'm just at the stage of life where I'm like, "OK, sure, definitely." Although it seems like the kind of quote that will follow you around for a while – or at least until the end of this year. I don't know if the book was different or it was just that lucky first media barrage…

Did it feel different while you were writing it?

A little bit. I always think about it as making a bigger doorway – not to dumb it down or turn away from the darkness but just to try to be a little more ecumenical about who could come to the book and enjoy it. When I was younger, a lot of my artistic energy was spent being aghast at how bad things could be. And then as you get older you're like, "Yeah they can be bad but they aren't always, so do we have some responsibility to reflect that?"

It doesn't always feel like you're aiming for mass appeal. Your stories often plunge us into strange environments – sex-filled drug trials, the inside of a teenage girl's head – and leave us to work it out.

Part of the game for me has always been to understand what the situation is as a writer and then to let you in with a high level of respect for your readerly intelligence. This book was funny because, with the New York Times thing, all kinds of people who probably shouldn't have bought the book did. And I'm starting to hear from them now. I got this really funny letter from a sweet woman in Vermont going, "Uhh, I'm returning your book, I don't want it in my house, I'm trying to eradicate these stories from my memory." It was mostly about the language: I don't think she liked the swearwords.

You have a great ear for ugly brand names – Verbaluce™ and Darkenfloxx™ are two good ones from the drug-trial story. Do you keep a notebook for things like that?

No. I'm really a child of my culture. I absorbed that stuff so enthusiastically and unironically as a kid. So I find if they just pop up, they're better. A drug that gives you a hard-on: Vivistif™. But it's interesting. I teach writing here [at Syracuse University in New York], and one of the things that's really hard to talk about, probably the thing that separates one writer from another, is the quality of those split-second decisions that he or she makes for no reason that you could ever name. Take a Shakespeare play and boil it down to its essence and it could be a telenovela. What is it about Shakespeare that made him great? I think it's that he's sitting there and he has a split-second intuition of how to express something that's just better than everyone else.

Do you have much experience of the kind of soul-crushing bureaucratic institutions that regularly crop up in your stories? I understand you once worked at something called the Radian Corporation, which sounds almost too perfect.

Yeah, I worked there for eight years while I was writing my first book, and before then I was working for a pharmaceutical company for about a year, and before that I worked over in Asia for a couple of years for an oil exploration deal, and also in between I worked in a slaughter-house and was a door man in Beverly Hills, but that was all quite a long time ago. I always felt it was good to have a sort of painful temporary immersion in capitalism in some of its worst forms, just so you get the lay of the land, so that, writing stories, you have some passing knowledge of what a corporate job feels like or what manual labour feels like.

I was intrigued to learn that you were once a fan of Ayn Rand. For a writer so alert to how capitalism can grind people down, that's unexpected.

It's kind of a sweet story. I was in high school in Chicago, not really doing any work. Neither of my parents had been to college so to me it wasn't a big thing. Then two teachers started taking an interest in me and giving me books, and one was Atlas Shrugged. I hadn't read a novel since third grade, and if you're a crummy reader sometimes bad art can do magical things. She appeals to a certain kind of adolescent male, I think, and she definitely got me.

So I went to college and read all the rest of the books and she was sort of my patron saint. Then you get an uncomfortable moment where you realise there's this little bag you're holding that's filling up with phenomena that don't really fit the model. And that bag got heavier and heavier. My family ran into some financial problems. And I thought, she would not understand what we're going through. She'd equate it with some kind of moral weakness on our part. And then after college I went to Asia and saw some things there that made the bag really heavy, and at some point I just said, "I don't get her any more, I'll set her down." Only years later I was like, "Oh my God, she's very dangerous." But I like that. I like the idea that someone can change. You could be a rabid right-winger one moment and then…

… you're forced to completely reassess your views. And I imagine you'd learn a lot in the process.

Exactly, because you've embraced the opposite view totally non-ironically so you can understand it. Even now, I look at the conservative movement here in the US, and I get it, I understand where they're coming from. Sometimes it's just a slight turn of the dial between these supposedly irrevocably separate liberals and conservatives.

Philip Roth recently advised a first-time novelist to quit while he was ahead, saying: "Really, it's an awful field. Just torture." Do you find writing a pleasure or a pain?

I guess it depends on how you describe pleasure or pain. If you're in love with somebody, there's always bad days. But in total you would not want to be anywhere else. That's certainly true for me.

You're a practising Buddhist. Does that help your writing?

I think it helps everything. I was writing a long time before I was a Buddhist and they're not that much different, in the way that any authentic spiritual thing is about seeing what it is, what's going on, and being willing to look at it honestly. I tend to not talk about Buddhism that much because I'm kind of a beginner, but it doesn't hurt, let's put it that way.

Do you write short stories because you don't see the point in doing something longer, or because you don't have the disposition to be a novelist?

It's more the latter. I see all kinds of points in writing a long thing because there are novels I love, but so far it hasn't really happened. I did write a couple of novels early on that didn't excite me and wouldn't have excited anybody, except with anger. I couldn't see beauty in them. Whereas with the short form I get it; I understand how to do something pretty cool and get the hell out of there before it gets boring.

What are you working on at the moment?

I'm going to be a little secretive about it because I'm superstitious, but I'm working on some number of pages that are very imperfect at the moment. We'll see what that becomes.

Do you ever yearn to do something completely different – a new style of writing, or another profession entirely?

I think dictator would be good. [laughs] I went through a period after the last book of stories when I felt a little bit at the end of my tether, I didn't know what to do next. So I wrote some screenplays, I wrote a column for the Guardian, I wrote a lot of humour for the New Yorker. I worked on a play that didn't work very well. Now I can see I was kind of restless, almost as if you'd been confined to a little two-room house for a while, very happily, and one day you're like, these two rooms are not enough, and so you go out into the yard and fart around. And then at some point the yard wasn't that fun for me, so about four years ago I made this decision: nothing but fiction. And this new book came out of that period. I love fiction, so for now I'm pretty happy. I found out that I'm a shitty screenwriter, a shitty playwright, an OK humourist. I've been out in the yard, looked around and it's cold, so I've come back in.

George Saunders's short story Home is part of Bloomsbury's Family Snapshots collection, out on 3 June