Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.
GEORGE SAUNDERSSocial media sometimes feels like a vehicle for one-dimensional sniping, more than true criticism.
More George Saunders Quotes
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Goodbye. I’m leaving because I’m bored.
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It seems to me that there are certain thoughts and vignettes and attitudes that I have always had the desire to represent.
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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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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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You can say you’re a liberal and everybody laughs and it’s a good time.
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I don’t feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.
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I think kindness is a sort of gateway virtue – having that simple aspiration can get you into deep water very quickly – in a good way.
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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.
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I think about how I conceptualize the audience. The trick is that they’ve got to be smarter and more worldly than me. So as I’m revising, I’m keeping that in mind. I cannot condescend, even a little bit. Every single choice that I make is motivated by that.
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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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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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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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At times, they’re so Right and I’m so Left, we agree.
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I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.
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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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS