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 SAUNDERSWhenever 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.
More George Saunders Quotes
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Our first responsibility in all things is to preserve our goodness of heart – then and only then act.
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When I was a kid, I took ‘The Brady Bunch’ and ‘The Partridge Family’ very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.
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He was a father. That’s what a father does.Eases the burdens of those he loves. Saves the ones he loves from painful last images that might endure for a lifetime.
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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’.
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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 -
I’m not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I’m just trusting that, if I’m working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.
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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 understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.
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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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When we talk about adversity, this is the moment when character really gets tested. When things aren’t going the way you want and you can’t see anyway that they’re going to go the way you want. That’s kind of when those old virtues really become valuable and vulnerable also.
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I see that being looked at askance as a form of elitism now, which is really scary.
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Goodbye. I am leaving because I am bored.
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I had an experience a few years ago where I was on a plane in which one of the engines went out. I couldn’t even remember my name. I was just repeating the word no over and over.
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Success makes opportunities and so many of those “opportunities” are actually exemptions – from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.
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Art is not some inessential frippery – it is the nation’s means of intelligently regarding itself. To cripple or stigmatize the arts is to doom one’s nation to a life of incuriosity, dullness, literalness and the worst kind of rank materialism.
GEORGE SAUNDERS