If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring it forth, it will destroy you.
GEORGE SAUNDERSOne of the inspiring things about Susan Sarandon career is that there’s a quality of real fearlessness in it – you seem to be in it for the challenge and the experience.
More George Saunders Quotes
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When we talk about adversity, this is the moment when character really gets tested. When things aren’t going the way you want and you can’t see anyway that they’re going to go the way you want. That’s kind of when those old virtues really become valuable and vulnerable also.
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So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it.
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Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort – and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.
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I was a straight arrow, a control freak. I didn’t do drugs or drink, and this was the ’70s. I didn’t like the loss of control. Which isn’t exactly right, because I didn’t know what happened when you did drugs.
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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.
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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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When I was a kid, I took ‘The Brady Bunch’ and ‘The Partridge Family’ very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.
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I always describe writing a story as throwing bowling pins in the air and then catching them.
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For me, when I’m coming up to a place where I have to make somebody up, it’s almost like driving and taking your hands off the wheel.
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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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Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.
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I have nothing. My model is I have nothing figured out, and I’m starting with some little nugget and hoping that it will talk back to me enough to let it grow.
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You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it’s not totally satisfied.
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I find that the great artists I’ve met are people who are so playfully invested in their process that, even if it doesn’t come out the way they like, they still power through and even take energy from it.
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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