All along, my mantra was: Don’t write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.
GEORGE SAUNDERSI’m very happy – if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I’m thrilled.
More George Saunders Quotes
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I have nothing. My model is I have nothing figured out, and I’m starting with some little nugget and hoping that it will talk back to me enough to let it grow.
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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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I’ve noticed that nowadays I’m doing a lot of stuff on the phone and on the computer, which I usually wouldn’t do earlier. And I can feel my brain being rewired:
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Even when the faith goes away, there’s that space where you crave something bigger than yourself. For me, that’s kind of where art came in, after that.
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Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
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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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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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…There is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end… Man, it occurs to me, is a joyful, buying-and-selling piece of work. I have been wrong, dead wrong, when I’ve decried consumerism.
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Early on, a story’s meaning and rationale seem pretty obvious, but then, as I write it, I realize that I know the meaning/rationale too well, which means that the reader will also know it – and so things have to be ramped up.
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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.
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Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else, disrupting the delusion that we’re permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we’re saved!) other people are real again, and we’re fond of them.
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I find that the great artists I’ve met are people who are so playfully invested in their process that, even if it doesn’t come out the way they like, they still power through and even take energy from it.
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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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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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Compassion doesn’t have to be weak or enabling; it can also be quite bold.
GEORGE SAUNDERS