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So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it.

George Saunders

The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Artist Jobs Thinking
I’m from a pretty working-class background, and I really worked hard in my life to eradicate those parts of myself that were stupidly trapped in that world.Those of us who come up that way made a series of choices to benefit ourselves and make ourselves more generous and open.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Benefits Choices Class
I’ve always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Energetic Normal Writing
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Arrows Drug Loss
There’s a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him – or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn’t have anything to do with his ego or his desire to ‘be a good writer’.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Feelings Nice Writing
The other thing that’s useful for me is this notion of the absolute versus the relative:if we walk out and it’s a beautiful morning, it’s only a beautiful morning because we don’t have a broken leg or hemorrhoids or something.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Beautiful Broken Morning
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.’
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Hate Ideas Voice
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Leeches People World
I’m not a natural criticizer – I prefer to like and praise and so on.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Critizixe Natural Praise
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
Goodbye. I am leaving because I am bored.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Crazy Goodbye Mad
Whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it – every word has a big question mark over it.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Remember Thinking Writing
I am always considering the reader. Although this is admittedly kind of odd: Which reader? On what day? In what mood? For me, that “reader” is actually just me, if I had never read the story before.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Actually Kind Mood Odd Stories
You can say you’re a liberal and everybody laughs and it’s a good time.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Good Laughing Times
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
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

So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it.

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So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it.

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Popular Authors

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