We have to move toward specificity, intelligence, facts, proof, and mutual affection. What I think people have to do now is be very, very assertive about the utter essentiality of intellectual undertakings.
GEORGE SAUNDERSI think something that I can’t name about our media has made us move away from that kind of specificity and that kind of curiosity.
More George Saunders Quotes
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When I think about what fiction does morally, I’m happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities – sort of fragmented.
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The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn’t damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.
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When you talk about a reader being emotionally moved, a feeling of empathy, I think that comes out of that line-by-line respect for reader. That’s actually where it all comes from.
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I want something a little more confident and more sure of the values that we’re defending, which are the old ones, love and empathy and patience and tolerance and civility. Not to get into politics or anything.
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I was trained in seismic prospecting. We’d drill a deep hole and put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill.
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My stories, I can understand them as a little toy that you wind up and you put it on the floor and it just goes under the coach. That I get. Beyond that, I’m a little lost.
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I think about how I conceptualize the audience. The trick is that they’ve got to be smarter and more worldly than me. So as I’m revising, I’m keeping that in mind. I cannot condescend, even a little bit. Every single choice that I make is motivated by that.
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The one thing about A Christmas Carol that always bothers me is that Cratchit is so sweet and perfect. He’s like an Ivy League kid who just is labeled “poor.” He doesn’t have any bad habits. He’s never cranky with his kids.
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We’re in the transition between birth and death. But the one that people often know about is the transition between the moment of death and whatever comes next, so reincarnation or heaven or hell.
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I always cheerfully say, “Well, you know, the species is adapting, and whatever it needs to do, it’ll do,” but I do think it’s maybe a little bit alarming.
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Success makes opportunities and so many of those “opportunities” are actually exemptions – from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.
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When we talk about adversity, this is the moment when character really gets tested. When things aren’t going the way you want and you can’t see anyway that they’re going to go the way you want. That’s kind of when those old virtues really become valuable and vulnerable also.
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Monologue is the most honest way to represent human beings.
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One way or the other; whether you get it or don’t get it, there’s a cost. That’s just basic responsibility, to admit that there’s a cost. And the bad karma is when you pretend that the thing is free.
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I’m turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don’t have an infinite number of years left and if there’s anything you want to say or represent, it’s time to try it.
GEORGE SAUNDERS