I would kind of, you know, go stand next to some unlucky guy and say eventually, Hi, I’m George. You know, I’m with The New Yorker. I’m a liberal. I’m somewhat left of Gandhi. Do you want to talk? And, you know, they always did.
GEORGE SAUNDERSMy go-to default is to try to be nice, which I feel does less harm in the long run than trying to be, say, assertive. If I am nice and maybe too passive, I find that easier to live with.
More George Saunders Quotes
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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.
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I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Yuck, yuck, yuck, I’m gonna be evil.”
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There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.
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Whatever happens when we die, it would be really weird if it was what we had expected. Even if you were a lifelong Christian believer, it would be kind of weird if there actually were pearly gates.
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Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.
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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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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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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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Whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it – every word has a big question mark over it.
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I’ve noticed that nowadays I’m doing a lot of stuff on the phone and on the computer, which I usually wouldn’t do earlier. And I can feel my brain being rewired:
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I’m not a big fan of my books going on cross-country road trips. They get arrogant and, next thing, start aspiring to become ‘large-print’ books. I say, let them stay home and be regular small-print books.
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I’m not a natural criticizer – I prefer to like and praise and so on.
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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.
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My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you’ve spent your day.
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I was trained in seismic prospecting. We’d drill a deep hole and put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill.
GEORGE SAUNDERS