Whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it – every word has a big question mark over it.
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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If I can be more efficient, I’m actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.
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Whole idea is really intriguing to me. If you took snapshots of ourselves throughout the day, the way that our mind is twisting and turning, then at the moment of death, the mind would be twisting and turning in the same way. But the Buddhists say it’s super-sized because there’s no bodily damper on it.
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You don’t want to be that parent – the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks – especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town.
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One of the ways that we cope with anxiety is by over planning and over controlling. If we know where it’s going to, we can just relax and do it.
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I see that being looked at askance as a form of elitism now, which is really scary.
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I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.
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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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As a writer I’m essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.
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If you’re going to make an emotional connection with somebody, whether it’s in the story or in the world, there’s a certain amount of self-acceptance that is required.
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I’m very happy – if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I’m thrilled.
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America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.
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Maybe you could even think 100,000 people are inside each human being. And you drop a novel on that person, and a certain number of those sub-people come alive or get reenergized for some finite time.
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Our first responsibility in all things is to preserve our goodness of heart – then and only then act.
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I’m not a natural criticizer – I prefer to like and praise and so on.
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I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I’ve done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.
GEORGE SAUNDERS