I think something that I can’t name about our media has made us move away from that kind of specificity and that kind of curiosity.
GEORGE SAUNDERSI would kind of, you know, go stand next to some unlucky guy and say eventually, Hi, I’m George. You know, I’m with The New Yorker. I’m a liberal. I’m somewhat left of Gandhi. Do you want to talk? And, you know, they always did.
More George Saunders Quotes
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Life is short, very short, and what are we doing here if not trying to become more generous and loving?
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Based on the experience of my life, which I have not exactly hit out of the park, I tend to agree with that thing about, If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. And would go even further to: Even if it is broke, leave it alone, you’ll probably make it worse.
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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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“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.
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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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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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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.
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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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I’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.
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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.
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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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I read Rand and thought, “I want to be one of the earth movers, the scientific people who power the world. I don’t want to be one of these lisping liberal artsy leeches.” So I was working against my actual abilities.
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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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The thing I’ve discovered that is a help is that there isn’t a simple virtue or a simple vice. They’re always connected. If you have Tendency A, that you loathe, you can almost be sure that Tendency B, which you love, is somehow connected to it.
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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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS






