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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,

George Saunders

We’re in the transition between birth and death. But the one that people often know about is the transition between the moment of death and whatever comes next, so reincarnation or heaven or hell.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Birth Heaven People
The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Artist Jobs Thinking
When 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!”
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Good Law School Writing
I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Compassion Play Thinking
In the moment of reading, the writer comes up to the surface and the reader comes up to the surface and they kiss, like two fish. That actually does happen.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Actually Kissing Reading Two
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
The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull – to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Fiction Overall Same Time Trying Writing
Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Compassion Earth Reason
…smile first, then speak.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Firsts Smile Speak
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Christian Kind Process Writer
If a writer understands his work as something that originates with him but then, with any luck, gets away from him, then what he needs is someone who can grasp the potential of the piece and lead him to that higher ground.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Ground Higher Luck Needs
Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Empathy Feelings Guilt
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

Engineering Jobs Thinking
At times, they’re so Right and I’m so Left, we agree.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Agree Left Right
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Art Kind Space
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

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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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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Popular Authors

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