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When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn’t see it. He can’t. He’s average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.

George Saunders

As a writer I’m essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Firsts Impression Stories Trying
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Games Kids Parent
In my case, when I am trying to be “kind” I often default in a sort of toothless loving-all stance that is, actually, not kind, because it is not truthful.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Be Kind Truthful Trying
I was a straight arrow, a control freak. I didn’t do drugs or drink, and this was the ’70s. I didn’t like the loss of control. Which isn’t exactly right, because I didn’t know what happened when you did drugs.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Arrows Drug Loss
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Artist Ideas Understanding
With nonfiction, I go in trying to be really honest about what my preconceptions are.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Honest Nonfiction Trying
One of the inspiring things about Susan Sarandon career is that there’s a quality of real fearlessness in it – you seem to be in it for the challenge and the experience.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Careers Challenges Real
My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you’ve spent your day.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Empathy Heart
Positive human action is not only possible, but pervasive; human beings can improve and choose light and so on. And this is all happening.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Action Humans Light
I find that the great artists I’ve met are people who are so playfully invested in their process that, even if it doesn’t come out the way they like, they still power through and even take energy from it.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Artist Energy People
I have finally realized that, you know, it’s not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Aspiration Given Writing
As a fiction writer, one of things you learn is God lives in specificity. You know, human kindness is increased as we pursue specificity.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Fiction God Kindness Life
Twitter is a deliberate abstention. Somehow I hate the idea of there always being, in the back of my mind, this little voice saying: ‘Oh, I should tweet about this.’
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Hate Ideas Voice
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Book Creating Expectations
At times, they’re so Right and I’m so Left, we agree.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Agree Left Right
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Greek Kids World

When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn’t see it. He can’t. He’s average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.

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Popular Authors

When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn’t see it. He can’t. He’s average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More George Saunders Quotes