Based on the experience of my life, which I have not exactly hit out of the park, I tend to agree with that thing about, If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. And would go even further to: Even if it is broke, leave it alone, you’ll probably make it worse.
GEORGE SAUNDERSWhen you’re embarking on a piece of writing, the anxiety is just too much, especially when you’re young and you’re trying to figure out if this is your thing or not. You feel like, “if I don’t write a good story, I gotta get going to law school!”
More George Saunders Quotes
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When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn’t see it. He can’t. He’s average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.
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My go-to default is to try to be nice, which I feel does less harm in the long run than trying to be, say, assertive. If I am nice and maybe too passive, I find that easier to live with.
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That’s the only way that I can figure out how to live, is to say, “Well, I don’t know what this adds up to, but I can do the best I can.”
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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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I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he’s made of sugar.
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I’ve always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.
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“Kindness” can mean a lot of different things. In this case, I felt I had to present his [Donald Trump’s] supporters in as fair a light as possible – many of them hadn’t been interviewed before and that entailed some interviewer-courtesy in the editing and so on.
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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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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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Whatever happens when we die, it would be really weird if it was what we had expected. Even if you were a lifelong Christian believer, it would be kind of weird if there actually were pearly gates.
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A culture’s ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.
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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.
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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.”
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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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If you have a friend, what’s the best way you can experience her beauty? It’s to really accept her. She’s weird in this way,
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