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What’s really baffling to me is the way that the technology has risen up to help us become more materialistic.

George Saunders

I think people have come to expect that in artistic representation; that every work of art should be a work of extravagant hope.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Arise Art Future People Satisfy Thinking
An artist’s job is to be interested in things as they are.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Artist Interested Jobs
The great American denial riff is that you can do whatever you like and you always triumph at the end. The world is saying no, you can do what you like, but there are consequences. And maturity is to be able to turn to the consequences and accept them.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Denial Maturity Triumph
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Free One Responsinbty Thing Time
My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period and what you’re really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces – trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Ideas Trying Writing
I was a big and un-ironic fan of Dear Abby when I was a kid in Chicago. I think I sort of internalized her. So I have this inner Abby: cranky, proper, folksy yet scathing, with a beehive hairdo. But that’s my issue.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Issues Kids Thinking
Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Happens Used Writing
The most hopeful thing in the stories, I hope, is wit. I make it up. If I make up a world in which we’re ruled by big talking turds, it doesn’t mean that we are. So you shouldn’t feel depressed.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Depressed Hopeful Mean Talking
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Fiction Thinking World
In the absolute sense – kind of from the God’s-eye view – God might feel like, “I made this thing that has all of that in it, all the horror and all the beauty.”
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Eye might Views
All traditions are also full of meanness for the sake of meanness.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Meanness Sake Tradition
Art is not some inessential frippery – it is the nation’s means of intelligently regarding itself. To cripple or stigmatize the arts is to doom one’s nation to a life of incuriosity, dullness, literalness and the worst kind of rank materialism.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Art Kind Literalness Mean Notion
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Littles Stories Wind
I often wonder if there are certain areas of real life that are roped off, with a sign saying, “Art, don’t come in here.” But that’s maybe a deeper question.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Art Real Wonder
Nostalgia is, ‘Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?’
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Hey Nostalgia Remember
I’ve always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Energetic Normal Writing

What’s really baffling to me is the way that the technology has risen up to help us become more materialistic.

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What’s really baffling to me is the way that the technology has risen up to help us become more materialistic.

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Popular Authors

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