If you’re going to make an emotional connection with somebody, whether it’s in the story or in the world, there’s a certain amount of self-acceptance that is required.
GEORGE SAUNDERSThe greatest thing about writing a book is that at first it’s all inchoate, but the more you work on it, the more the book teaches you its internal rules.
More George Saunders Quotes
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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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When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
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Fiction is open to whoever comes in the door, as long as you come in energetically.
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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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I’ve seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something dignifies and improves a person.
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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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Social media sometimes feels like a vehicle for one-dimensional sniping, more than true criticism.
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My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period and what you’re really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces – trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work.
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Nostalgia is, ‘Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?’
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Maybe you could even think 100,000 people are inside each human being. And you drop a novel on that person, and a certain number of those sub-people come alive or get reenergized for some finite time.
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Even when the faith goes away, there’s that space where you crave something bigger than yourself. For me, that’s kind of where art came in, after that.
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When I think about what fiction does morally, I’m happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities – sort of fragmented.
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The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.
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I don’t feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.
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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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