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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.

George Saunders

I actually believe that a lot of what people call originality has to do with persistence in the craft.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Believe People Persistence
Goodbye. I’m leaving because I’m bored.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Bored Goodbye Leaving
When I wrote that [Donald] Trump piece, I had this uncomfortable experience of sensing a lot of things that were nascent, that I couldn’t quite articulate. And one of them was this move toward anti-intellectualism. An anti-love move, even.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Anti Love Moving Pieces
America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

America Nuts Voice
When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Aware Stories Want World
One 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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Careers Challenges Real
Compassion doesn’t have to be weak or enabling; it can also be quite bold.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Compassion Enabling Weak
When somebody you’ve known for 20 years, and with whom you have a full context, winks at you or whatever, it can be huge. I think in a sense what you’re trying to re-create in fiction is that.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Thinking Trying Years
Life is short, very short, and what are we doing here if not trying to become more generous and loving?
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Generous Life Short Trying
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Challenges Ideas Writing
Success makes opportunities and so many of those “opportunities” are actually exemptions – from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Hardship Opportunity Struggle
The one thing I noticed retroactively was that the energy at those Trump rallies was off the charts compared to the Hillary Clinton rallies. The Bernie Sanders energy was as good, gentler, but there was a real passion there.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Energy Passion Real
My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you’ve spent your day.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Empathy Heart
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Continue Curiosity Long Losing Tired
Nostalgia is, ‘Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?’
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Hey Nostalgia Remember
Goodbye. I am leaving because I am bored.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Crazy Goodbye Mad
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Book Country Home
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Falling In Love Graduation Kindness
I read to make myself feel awake.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Awake Feels Myself
I think people have come to expect that in artistic representation; that every work of art should be a work of extravagant hope.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Arise Art Future People Satisfy Thinking
If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring it forth, it will destroy you.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Destroy Forth Within You
When you talk about a reader being emotionally moved, a feeling of empathy, I think that comes out of that line-by-line respect for reader. That’s actually where it all comes from.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Empathy Feelings Thinking
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Book Mean Writing
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 SAUNDERS

Erosion Grace Intellectual
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Fiction Overall Same Time Trying Writing
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Littles Stories Wind
All traditions are also full of meanness for the sake of meanness.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Meanness Sake Tradition

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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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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Popular Authors

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