I want something a little more confident and more sure of the values that we’re defending, which are the old ones, love and empathy and patience and tolerance and civility. Not to get into politics or anything.
GEORGE SAUNDERSWe have to move toward specificity, intelligence, facts, proof, and mutual affection. What I think people have to do now is be very, very assertive about the utter essentiality of intellectual undertakings.
More George Saunders Quotes
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When you’re embarking on a piece of writing, the anxiety is just too much, especially when you’re young and you’re trying to figure out if this is your thing or not. You feel like, “if I don’t write a good story, I gotta get going to law school!”
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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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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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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.
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The scariest thought in the world is that someday I’ll wake up and realize I’ve been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual.
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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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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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I’ve noticed that nowadays I’m doing a lot of stuff on the phone and on the computer, which I usually wouldn’t do earlier. And I can feel my brain being rewired:
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I often wonder if there are certain areas of real life that are roped off, with a sign saying, “Art, don’t come in here.” But that’s maybe a deeper question.
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I’m not a natural criticizer – I prefer to like and praise and so on.
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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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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.
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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.
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I was trained in seismic prospecting. We’d drill a deep hole and put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill.
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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