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Our first responsibility in all things is to preserve our goodness of heart – then and only then act.

George Saunders

I’m not a natural criticizer – I prefer to like and praise and so on.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Critizixe Natural Praise
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Beauty Make Model Something
I read to make myself feel awake.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Awake Feels Myself
When we talk about adversity, this is the moment when character really gets tested. When things aren’t going the way you want and you can’t see anyway that they’re going to go the way you want. That’s kind of when those old virtues really become valuable and vulnerable also.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Adversity Character Want
Our first responsibility in all things is to preserve our goodness of heart – then and only then act.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Firsts Heart Responsibility
Your first responsibility is to yourself and to your own goodness of heart.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Firsts Heart Responsibility
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
Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Empathy Feelings Guilt
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
My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you’ve spent your day.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Empathy Heart
I’m turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don’t have an infinite number of years left and if there’s anything you want to say or represent, it’s time to try it.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Guy Numbers Years
I don’t feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Feels Levels Prose
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Permanent Prayer Reading Real Suddenly
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.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Mean Stories Writing
Success makes opportunities and so many of those “opportunities” are actually exemptions – from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Hardship Opportunity Struggle
I always cheerfully say, “Well, you know, the species is adapting, and whatever it needs to do, it’ll do,” but I do think it’s maybe a little bit alarming.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Fun Phone Thinking

Our first responsibility in all things is to preserve our goodness of heart – then and only then act.

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Our first responsibility in all things is to preserve our goodness of heart – then and only then act.

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