Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.
GEORGE SAUNDERSI 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.
More George Saunders Quotes
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I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That’s really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects – a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world.
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I think kindness is a sort of gateway virtue – having that simple aspiration can get you into deep water very quickly – in a good way.
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Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else, disrupting the delusion that we’re permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we’re saved!) other people are real again, and we’re fond of them.
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A culture’s ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.
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The most hopeful thing in the stories, I hope, is wit. I make it up. If I make up a world in which we’re ruled by big talking turds, it doesn’t mean that we are. So you shouldn’t feel depressed.
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You can say you’re a liberal and everybody laughs and it’s a good time.
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Even when the faith goes away, there’s that space where you crave something bigger than yourself. For me, that’s kind of where art came in, after that.
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If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences – where things turn out better than you thought they would – ought to be in there somewhere, too.
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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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Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.
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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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Do all the other things, the ambitious things – travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes…but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness.
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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.
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We’re in the transition between birth and death. But the one that people often know about is the transition between the moment of death and whatever comes next, so reincarnation or heaven or hell.
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What’s really baffling to me is the way that the technology has risen up to help us become more materialistic.
GEORGE SAUNDERS