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He was a father. That’s what a father does.Eases the burdens of those he loves. Saves the ones he loves from painful last images that might endure for a lifetime.

George Saunders

Whatever you love, that will be an influence. It just will. So in effect the young writer’s job is: go out and find some stuff to love.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Jobs Stuff Young Writers
Whole idea is really intriguing to me. If you took snapshots of ourselves throughout the day, the way that our mind is twisting and turning, then at the moment of death, the mind would be twisting and turning in the same way. But the Buddhists say it’s super-sized because there’s no bodily damper on it.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Buddhist Ideas Mind
When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Aware Stories Want World
I heard Zen teacher one time talking about abortion, and he was saying the way that abortion makes bad karma is any time the person involved pretends that there’s not a cost to the choice.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Karma Responsibility Teacher
I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Compassion Play Thinking
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
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
I think people have come to expect that in artistic representation; that every work of art should be a work of extravagant hope.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Arise Art Future People Satisfy Thinking
And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them – I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Beauty Make Model Something
When somebody you’ve known for 20 years, and with whom you have a full context, winks at you or whatever, it can be huge. I think in a sense what you’re trying to re-create in fiction is that.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Thinking Trying Years
The thing I’ve discovered that is a help is that there isn’t a simple virtue or a simple vice. They’re always connected. If you have Tendency A, that you loathe, you can almost be sure that Tendency B, which you love, is somehow connected to it.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Love Simple Vices
As the writer of this book [Lincoln in the Bardo], what I loved was the feeling of having so many surprises come at the end that I hadn’t really planned or planted.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Book Feelings Surprise
Fiction is open to whoever comes in the door, as long as you come in energetically.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Doors Fiction Energetically Long
I have finally realized that, you know, it’s not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Aspiration Given Writing
There’s this de facto assumption that for something to have value, it has to be economically self-supporting – which imposes a very low ceiling on a culture.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Ceiling Culture Self
I’m fascinated with actors, and I’ve never quite understood the process.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Actors Never Quit Process

He was a father. That’s what a father does.Eases the burdens of those he loves. Saves the ones he loves from painful last images that might endure for a lifetime.

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He was a father. That’s what a father does.Eases the burdens of those he loves. Saves the ones he loves from painful last images that might endure for a lifetime.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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