George Saunders Quotes - Page 4

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• So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go.

  George Saunders

  Ideas, Trying, Stories

  Interview with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. January 18, 2013.

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• Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.

  George Saunders

  Erosion, Grace, Intellectual

  George Saunders (2013). “Tenth of December”, p.27, A&C Black

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• Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we're central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we're separate from the universe (there's US and then, out there, all that other junk - dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we're permanent (death is real, o.k., sure - for you, but not for me).

  George Saunders

  Dog, Real, Clouds

  "George Saunders’s Advice to Graduates". 6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com. July 31, 2013.

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• What concerns me most is the horrible degradation our notions of truth, civility, and decency have undergone. Also the way that language has been malformed - we have been overcome with banality and the cynical misuse of language. When a candidate runs a campaign on a series of dog-whistles to bigots, then turns around and talks about "healing the wounds of division," that is right out of Orwell.

  George Saunders

  Running, Dog, Healing

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• Nostalgia is, 'Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?'

  George Saunders

  Hey, Nostalgia, Remember

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• A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.

  George Saunders

  Lucky, Generations, Genre

  "Achenblog. John Updike". voices.washingtonpost.com. January 27, 2009.

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• The word 'funny' is a bit like the word 'love' - we don't have enough words to describe the many varieties.

  George Saunders

  Enough, Words Love, Variety

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• We have to move toward specificity, intelligence, facts, proof, and mutual affection. What I think people have to do now is be very, very assertive about the utter essentiality of intellectual undertakings.

  George Saunders

  Moving, Thinking, People

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• Honestly, the choice is: I can be a cheerful person, more awake to correction, more of a force for good ... when I'm writing. Or I can be the opposite of all those things, when I'm not writing.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Opposites, Choices

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When I'm not writing, I tend to get depressed and a little bit surly. And then when I'm writing, suddenly I feel enlivened. Now the only thing as I'm getting older that I notice is that it's a pattern.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Getting Older, Patterns

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• We're in the transition between birth and death. But the one that people often know about is the transition between the moment of death and whatever comes next, so reincarnation or heaven or hell.

  George Saunders

  People, Heaven, Birth

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• This - where we are now - is where a culture gets to, when it has chosen, for many years, banality over intelligence, the literal over the immaterial or complex, materialism over spirituality. This is the result of many years of disrespecting the intellectual project - of a collective acceptance of the idea that thinking and reasoning and reading deeply in difficult text and being respectful of history are somehow "wimpy" or secondary.

  George Saunders

  Reading, Acceptance, Thinking

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• When you talk about a reader being emotionally moved, a feeling of empathy, I think that comes out of that line-by-line respect for reader. That's actually where it all comes from.

  George Saunders

  Thinking, Empathy, Feelings

  Source: therumpus.net

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• In the Buddhist texts, some of them say, when you die, basically that wild horse gets cut loose, and the mind is incredibly powerful and expansive, omniscient and can go anywhere and see anything, but - and this is the catch - it's colored by the habits of thought we made in life.

  George Saunders

  Buddhist, Horse, Powerful

  Interview with Jenny Shank, www.patheos.com. March 6, 2017.

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• The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim.

  George Saunders

  Writing, People, Sloth

  George Saunders (2013). “Tenth of December”, p.21, A&C Black

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• It seemed to me, in some way, especially when you're looking back at distant historical events, the "Truth" with a capital "T" is kind of the juxtaposition of all the many, many, many truths that seem true to people at the time.

  George Saunders

  People, Historical, Kind

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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• I came to writing kind of late. I was an engineer, and the one thing I've learned is that you have to steer a project in the direction of the maximum fun for you. You could say lively energy, or you have to try to be intrigued. Basically, if you were a musician and you were playing joylessly, nobody would want to hear you.

  George Saunders

  Fun, Writing, Trying

  "George Saunders: It's All About Suckage-Avoidance". Interview With Doug Polisin, www.audible.com. March 15, 2017.

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• Every writer has to find the thing to keep her eye on about which she has strong opinions. That's of course deeply personal, but the nice thing is that it has to do with joy rather than fear. It has to do with you. If you're funny, your method will be to try to be funnier. Which again is empowering I think.

  George Saunders

  Strong, Nice, Eye

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Certainly we're always rooting for our particular contingent moment to be a great one. Pain-free. But the more expansive vision has to include the idea that, even for us, sometimes our particular contingent moment is going to be horrific.

  George Saunders

  Pain, Ideas, Vision

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• To me, the process of writing is just reading what I've written and - like running your hand over one of those mod glass stovetops to find where the heat is - looking for where the energy is in the prose, then going in the direction of that. It's an exercise in being open to whatever is there.

  George Saunders

  Running, Reading, Writing

  The Missouri Review Interview, www.missourireview.com. June 1, 2001.

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• I was trained in seismic prospecting. We'd drill a deep hole and put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill.

  George Saunders

  Blow, Giving, Holes

  George Saunders (2013). “Tenth of December”, p.23, A&C Black

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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.

  George Saunders

  Kids, Games, Parent

  "This Week in Fiction: George Saunders" by Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. October 4, 2012.

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• Monologue is the most honest way to represent human beings.

  George Saunders

  Way, Honest, Monologues

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• Stay alert. The big moral crossroads in your life may not come labeled as such.

  George Saunders

  May, Moral, Crossroads

  "Author George Saunders: 'Holding Out A High Vision Of What Art Is Supposed To Do'". Interview with Colin Winnette, www.buzzfeed.com. January 2, 2014.

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• If I go to the coffee shop and have a nice interaction with the barista, I don't know what that does for world peace, but we have to assume that in the great basket of goodness maybe that's one little micron or one little neutron that you've put in there.

  George Saunders

  Nice, Coffee, Littles

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