George Saunders Quotes

I'm not thinking in any big thematic or conceptual terms - especially in this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] when I was trying to make the voices more active, more energetic.

I'm a control freak. I'm defensive. And I'm an egomaniac. That's true about me.

Social media sometimes feels like a vehicle for one-dimensional sniping, more than true criticism.

If you could press a button and your ego investment was less, the toothache would be less. Or less tragic at least.

I'm not a natural criticizer - I prefer to like and praise and so on.

In the moment of reading, the writer comes up to the surface and the reader comes up to the surface and they kiss, like two fish. That actually does happen.

My stories, I can understand them as a little toy that you wind up and you put it on the floor and it just goes under the coach. That I get. Beyond that, I'm a little lost.

If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring it forth, it will destroy you.

He was a father. That's what a father does.Eases the burdens of those he loves. Saves the ones he loves from painful last images that might endure for a lifetime.

It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.

Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.

America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.

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.

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

I try to keep my artistic opinions not so much "to myself" but "on myself."

I feel nervous because I revere [Zadie Smith] so much. I don't want to be stupid. If I say something stupid, just interrupt me.

I have a lot of theories about the beneficial effects of fiction, but I'm always trying to get away from them a little bit.

The old and honorable American notion, that a person who works hard should be able to live in freedom and security, with dignity - seems to have taken on a secondary status.

It's on us to investigate ourselves for any lingering sense that we are 'giving' equality. We are not. It is already given. And not by us.

I think this is the other big issue that is not going away: Do we really believe that bit in the Constitution or not? I think we do.

The demographics are changing - and so what? Citizenship is a question of certain agreed-upon values and that is that. Do we believe that? I think at heart we do.

Equality has always been extant but some of us just didn't know it.

I watched a documentary about the immigrant crisis around the world. And it does make me blush at all the times I've stood up on the stage and given your speech about the healing power of fiction.

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.

Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.

In fiction, conceptualizing, I've found, produces dull and over-controlled text.

As one gets older, this question of death, becomes more vexing and urgent.

You go to the marketplace and there are seventeen consciousnesses moving in and out. Sometimes you want the same shirt that I want, and our thought bubbles collide a bit and that makes plot.

When you do something that's going to speak to people, it's going to be because you're really allowing all of yourself to the table in an accepting way.

The greatest thing about writing a book is that at first it's all inchoate, but the more you work on it, the more the book teaches you its internal rules.

The millions or billions of micro decisions that you're going to make, that's what will determine who you are as a writer, not you deciding in advance.

I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.

Whether you're eighteen or sixty, in a certain way, whatever you know is valid.

I think the path for a young writer might be one that says, "I have to accept myself, this is what I am. I can't eradicate my defects. I can work on them."

We have not been energetic enough - white people haven't - in pursuing racial equity.

I don't know about transformation. But scientifically you can say: Well, it doesn't seem to hurt anybody. Personally I've been cheered by books at really critical moments. That much I believe.

I don't really do much social media. I just don't like it that much. I've trained myself to write very slowly for a lot of money so it really galls me to write quickly for free.

My go-to default is to try to be nice, which I feel does less harm in the long run than trying to be, say, assertive. If I am nice and maybe too passive, I find that easier to live with.

Compassion doesn't have to be weak or enabling; it can also be quite bold.

I've had that my whole career. People were always hedging around the question of: Why are you so dark? What happened to you?

I watched a bunch of kids movies on Christmas. I was kind of joking with our family by asking, "Is anyone allowed to die in a kid's movie anymore?"

When somebody you've known for 20 years, and with whom you have a full context, winks at you or whatever, it can be huge. I think in a sense what you're trying to re-create in fiction is that.

Even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good place to play with that thing and to begin to really see it.

While I'm doing [writing], I don't feel it.I don't think that's a failing. I think it's just a feature. Like, a feature of oneself.

I believe that, when [meeting of writer and reader] happens and the reader goes out into the world the next day, there's some alteration that might possibly inflect the person positively.

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.

Of course there's objective truth, but when we're looking at people's accounts of it, it seems the real truth lies in the accretion of all these different versions.

If you want to be good, all you've got to do is be good.

What evil does first in the world, maybe, is distract us from our pursuit of goodness.

While writing this book [Lincoln in the Bardo], [idea of inclusion] occurred to me, you either believe in the Constitution or you don't. If you do, it's intense in what it wants of us.