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 SAUNDERSI think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.
More George Saunders Quotes
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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.
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I’m a big lover of America. I love the people, but also the weird berms, the strange little high schools tucked away in different places, and just the whole geography and the psychological apparatus of Americans.
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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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Nostalgia is, ‘Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?’
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…smile first, then speak.
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Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.
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I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That’s really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects – a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world.
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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.
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All along, my mantra was: Don’t write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.
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When you talk about a reader being emotionally moved, a feeling of empathy, I think that comes out of that line-by-line respect for reader. That’s actually where it all comes from.
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I’m fascinated with actors, and I’ve never quite understood the process.
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My go-to default is to try to be nice, which I feel does less harm in the long run than trying to be, say, assertive. If I am nice and maybe too passive, I find that easier to live with.
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The most hopeful thing in the stories, I hope, is wit. I make it up. If I make up a world in which we’re ruled by big talking turds, it doesn’t mean that we are. So you shouldn’t feel depressed.
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I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Yuck, yuck, yuck, I’m gonna be evil.”
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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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS