I’m not a big fan of my books going on cross-country road trips. They get arrogant and, next thing, start aspiring to become ‘large-print’ books. I say, let them stay home and be regular small-print books.
GEORGE SAUNDERSIf I can be more efficient, I’m actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.
More George Saunders Quotes
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Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
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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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I actually believe that a lot of what people call originality has to do with persistence in the craft.
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The 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.
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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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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.
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I think something that I can’t name about our media has made us move away from that kind of specificity and that kind of curiosity.
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A culture’s ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.
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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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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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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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If I can be more efficient, I’m actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.
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The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull – to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.
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I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it’s a nice way to neutralize that polarization.
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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