George Saunders Quotes

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.
George Saunders

Life, Good, Truth

The scariest thought in the world is that someday I'll wake up and realize I've been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual.
George Saunders

Life, Love, Fear

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.
George Saunders

Compassion, Reason, Here

Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.
George Saunders

Honesty, Irony, Volume

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

Love, Funny, Words

I'm always aware of writing around things I can't do, and I've come to think that that's actually what 'style' is - an avoidance of your deficiencies.
George Saunders

Writing, Around, Actually

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

Remember, Used, Nostalgia

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

Someone, Real, Else

To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.
George Saunders

Yourself, Care, Job

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

Same, Lucky, Generation

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.
George Saunders

Live, Writing, Means

Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by 'The New Yorker.'
George Saunders

Story, Accepted, Yorker

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain.
George Saunders

Character, Moments, Explain

Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
George Saunders

Greatest, Short, Story

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

Pretty, Write, Means

For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.
George Saunders

I could actually care less about the poor. We have some living near us, and pee-yew. They are always coming and going to their three or four jobs at all hours of the day and night. Annoying!
George Saunders

Care, Night, Living

I often think about image, and image is something that - but in truth, the real artistic process, as I've understood it, is 95 percent intuitive, like seat-of-the-pants, at-the-moment decisions that you can't even explain, you know?
George Saunders

Truth, Real, Decisions

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.
George Saunders

Life, Society, Done

I still believe that capitalism is too harsh and I believe that, even within that, there is a lot of satisfaction and beauty if you happen to be one of the lucky ones, although that doesn't eradicate the reality of the suffering. It's all true at once, kind of humming and sublime.
George Saunders

Beauty, True, Reality

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.
George Saunders

Birthday, Sympathy, Character

I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.
George Saunders

Good, Short, Whatever

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.
George Saunders

Time, Nice, Actually

I turned 54 this year and I find myself feeling like I'm in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life - or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations.
George Saunders

Life, Positive, Feeling

I was a big and un-ironic fan of Dear Abby when I was a kid in Chicago. I think I sort of internalized her. So I have this inner Abby: cranky, proper, folksy yet scathing, with a beehive hairdo. But that's my issue.
George Saunders

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Writer

Born: December 2, 1958

Links

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Cite this Page: Citation

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