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 SAUNDERSTo 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.
More George Saunders Quotes
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Why were we put here, so inclined to love, when end of our story = death? That harsh. That cruel. Do not like.
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I’m not a natural criticizer – I prefer to like and praise and so on.
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Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.
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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 think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.
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I actually believe that a lot of what people call originality has to do with persistence in the craft.
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Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.
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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.
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You can say you’re a liberal and everybody laughs and it’s a good time.
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If I can be more efficient, I’m actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.
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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.
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I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it’s a nice way to neutralize that polarization.
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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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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 tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he’s made of sugar.
GEORGE SAUNDERS