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 SAUNDERSI think something that I can’t name about our media has made us move away from that kind of specificity and that kind of curiosity.
More George Saunders Quotes
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So, good news/bad news: good news that I’m progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long.
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I want something a little more confident and more sure of the values that we’re defending, which are the old ones, love and empathy and patience and tolerance and civility. Not to get into politics or anything.
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One of the things I noticed about the Trump supporters was a lot of projected fear. I can’t tell you how many times a conversation went like this: “We’ve got to stop these immigrants, because it’s terrible.” I’d say, “Okay, what personally have you observed about this?” And there would be basically nothing in that box. And I’d say, “Where’d you get your information?” thinking they were going to say Fox. But they would always say, “Well, I get my information from all kinds of sources.” Fox is kind of center-left to a lot of people now.
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I always cheerfully say, “Well, you know, the species is adapting, and whatever it needs to do, it’ll do,” but I do think it’s maybe a little bit alarming.
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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.
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Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.
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To understand any plea for further consideration of a group you don’t know anything about to be some form of, quote, political correctness. These things are bubbling right under us.
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The greatest thing about writing a book is that at first it’s all inchoate, but the more you work on it, the more the book teaches you its internal rules.
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I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That’s really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects – a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world.
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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.’
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I’m not a natural criticizer – I prefer to like and praise and so on.
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The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.
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There’s a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him – or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn’t have anything to do with his ego or his desire to ‘be a good writer’.
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Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.
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If I find myself being too earnest and sentimental and hyperbolic and simplistic, which is definitely a tendency I have, then I bring in this perverse henchman.
GEORGE SAUNDERS