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Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.

George Saunders

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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Ideas Trying Writing
As a fiction writer, one of things you learn is God lives in specificity. You know, human kindness is increased as we pursue specificity.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Fiction God Kindness Life
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 SAUNDERS

Contribute Emotion Service Writing
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
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
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Games Kids Parent
I see that being looked at askance as a form of elitism now, which is really scary.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Askance Form Really Scary
I always describe writing a story as throwing bowling pins in the air and then catching them.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Air Stories Writing
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
Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Empathy Feelings Guilt
…smile first, then speak.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Firsts Smile Speak
I read to make myself feel awake.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Awake Feels Myself
The one thing I noticed retroactively was that the energy at those Trump rallies was off the charts compared to the Hillary Clinton rallies. The Bernie Sanders energy was as good, gentler, but there was a real passion there.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Energy Passion Real
We have to move toward specificity, intelligence, facts, proof, and mutual affection. What I think people have to do now is be very, very assertive about the utter essentiality of intellectual undertakings.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Moving People Thinking
It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Guy Rotten Way
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

Littles Stories Wind

Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.

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Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.

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