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.
GEORGE SAUNDERSI’m turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don’t have an infinite number of years left and if there’s anything you want to say or represent, it’s time to try it.
More George Saunders Quotes
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Early on, a story’s meaning and rationale seem pretty obvious, but then, as I write it, I realize that I know the meaning/rationale too well, which means that the reader will also know it – and so things have to be ramped up.
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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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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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And I have finally realized that, you know, it’s not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it – which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course.
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All traditions are also full of meanness for the sake of meanness.
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The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull – to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.
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I do find the values in A Christmas Carol significant. It is important not to be mean and stingy and not to give up love for money.
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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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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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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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In my case, when I am trying to be “kind” I often default in a sort of toothless loving-all stance that is, actually, not kind, because it is not truthful.
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Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
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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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So, good news/bad news: good news that I’m progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long.
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I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.
GEORGE SAUNDERS