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Monologue is the most honest way to represent human beings.

George Saunders

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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Jobs Stuff Young Writers
…smile first, then speak.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Firsts Smile Speak
Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Advice Confusion Medicine
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

Book Feelings Surprise
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Giving Important Mean Up
If I find myself being too earnest and sentimental and hyperbolic and simplistic, which is definitely a tendency I have, then I bring in this perverse henchman.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Henchmen Sentimental Tendencies
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Book Creating Expectations
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
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Kindness Simple Thinking
In the moment of reading, the writer comes up to the surface and the reader comes up to the surface and they kiss, like two fish. That actually does happen.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Actually Kissing Reading Two
As a writer I’m essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Firsts Impression Stories Trying
“Kindness” can mean a lot of different things. In this case, I felt I had to present his [Donald Trump’s] supporters in as fair a light as possible – many of them hadn’t been interviewed before and that entailed some interviewer-courtesy in the editing and so on.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Kindness Light Mean
When I think about what fiction does morally, I’m happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities – sort of fragmented.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Fiction Fragmented Thinking
The one thing about A Christmas Carol that always bothers me is that Cratchit is so sweet and perfect. He’s like an Ivy League kid who just is labeled “poor.” He doesn’t have any bad habits. He’s never cranky with his kids.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Kids League Sports Sweet
There’s this de facto assumption that for something to have value, it has to be economically self-supporting – which imposes a very low ceiling on a culture.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Ceiling Culture Self
The book says [Lincoln in the Bardo],”I really need this sci-fi device of a ghost inhabiting another person.” You say okay kind of begrudgingly. So the structure seemed informed by need and efficiency.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Book Kind Needs Structure

Monologue is the most honest way to represent human beings.

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Monologue is the most honest way to represent human beings.

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