For me, when I’m coming up to a place where I have to make somebody up, it’s almost like driving and taking your hands off the wheel.
GEORGE SAUNDERSAll traditions are also full of meanness for the sake of meanness.
More George Saunders Quotes
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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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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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My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you’ve spent your day.
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You don’t want to be that parent – the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks – especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town.
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I read to make myself feel awake.
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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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Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
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When I wrote that [Donald] Trump piece, I had this uncomfortable experience of sensing a lot of things that were nascent, that I couldn’t quite articulate. And one of them was this move toward anti-intellectualism. An anti-love move, even.
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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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To understand any plea for further consideration of a group you don’t know anything about to be some form of, quote, political correctness. These things are bubbling right under us.
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Someone told me once – I mean I said, “Is it ok that I don’t really know what the three-act structure is?” And he said, “It’s basically: Act 1: a guy climbs up a tree; Act 2: people come and throw stuff at him; Act 3: he gets down.”
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And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them – I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode.
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One of the ways that we cope with anxiety is by over planning and over controlling. If we know where it’s going to, we can just relax and do it.
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Whole idea is really intriguing to me. If you took snapshots of ourselves throughout the day, the way that our mind is twisting and turning, then at the moment of death, the mind would be twisting and turning in the same way. But the Buddhists say it’s super-sized because there’s no bodily damper on it.
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I’m getting anxious, I’m getting more manic. Now, I’m an extreme case because I’m old and I’m overdoing it. But still, it’s really interesting that I can actually feel a change in my neurochemistry from this interaction with the technology.
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Compassion doesn’t have to be weak or enabling; it can also be quite bold.
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It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.
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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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Early on, a story’s meaning and rationale seem pretty obvious, but then, as I write it, I realize that I know the meaning/rationale too well, which means that the reader will also know it – and so things have to be ramped up.
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I have nothing. My model is I have nothing figured out, and I’m starting with some little nugget and hoping that it will talk back to me enough to let it grow.
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You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it’s not totally satisfied.
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And I have finally realized that, you know, it’s not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it – which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course.
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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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I often wonder if there are certain areas of real life that are roped off, with a sign saying, “Art, don’t come in here.” But that’s maybe a deeper question.
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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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An artist’s job is to be interested in things as they are.
GEORGE SAUNDERS