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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.

George Saunders

When I think about what fiction does morally, I’m happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities – sort of fragmented.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Fiction Fragmented Thinking
Positive human action is not only possible, but pervasive; human beings can improve and choose light and so on. And this is all happening.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Action Humans Light
It seems to me that there are certain thoughts and vignettes and attitudes that I have always had the desire to represent.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Attitude Desire Vignettes
My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you’ve spent your day.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Empathy Heart
If I can be more efficient, I’m actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Intimacy Reader Respectful
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Adversity Character Want
I’m from a pretty working-class background, and I really worked hard in my life to eradicate those parts of myself that were stupidly trapped in that world.Those of us who come up that way made a series of choices to benefit ourselves and make ourselves more generous and open.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Benefits Choices Class
If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring it forth, it will destroy you.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Destroy Forth Within You
Twitter is a deliberate abstention. Somehow I hate the idea of there always being, in the back of my mind, this little voice saying: ‘Oh, I should tweet about this.’
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Hate Ideas Voice
There’s this de facto assumption that for something to have value, it has to be economically self-supporting – which imposes a very low ceiling on a culture.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Ceiling Culture Self
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
I’m not a natural criticizer – I prefer to like and praise and so on.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Critizixe Natural Praise
When somebody you’ve known for 20 years, and with whom you have a full context, winks at you or whatever, it can be huge. I think in a sense what you’re trying to re-create in fiction is that.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Thinking Trying Years
I’m very happy – if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I’m thrilled.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Littles Short Stories Story
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Numbers People Thinking
I know what it feels like to be in that middle and lower-middle class, and feel like the culture is passing you by; it translates into a great sense of personal frustration that can then morph into political frustration.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Class Frustration Political

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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