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When I write I know that I'm going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need.
George Saunders
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George Saunders
Age: 65
Born: 1958
Born: December 2
Essayist
Fantasy Author
Geological Engineer
Geophysicist
Journalist
Novelist
Professor
Prosaist
Short Story Writer
Teacher
Amarillo
Texas
Produce
Percent
Write
Need
Needs
Writing
Going
More quotes by George Saunders
I would say one thing writing this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] did for me was underscore the fact that this issue [all men are created equal] has never been properly addressed and it hasn't gone away.
George Saunders
This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eilimate disparity. the traffic stops.
George Saunders
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.
George Saunders
I think the wave of social media rejection is coming. I think there will be a big reaction against it. It's just like sugar- - mean, I loved it as a kid.
George Saunders
Compassion doesn't have to be weak or enabling it can also be quite bold.
George Saunders
I was thinking about the legacy of ghosts in fiction, and specifically the moral power of those Dickensian ghosts. Because a ghost can be a very powerful but also manipulative element.
George Saunders
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
I guess what I'm trying to say is that whatever weirdness was going to be in there, I felt, had to be earned. And it had to be required by the emotional needs of the book.
George Saunders
For me, when I'm coming up to a place where I have to make somebody up, it's almost like driving and taking your hands off the wheel.
George Saunders
In fiction, conceptualizing, I've found, produces dull and over-controlled text.
George Saunders
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
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
I've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.
George Saunders
I think it is time for a new pride in the intellectual life, and a new impatience with people who take pride in ignorance, or somehow use elite to mean person who has taken the time to know and then are eager to dismiss, say, striving, or the notion that improving one's self out of difficult conditions is a noble thing.
George Saunders
I try to keep my artistic opinions not so much to myself but on myself.
George Saunders
If I'm writing a story and you're reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process.
George Saunders
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
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
So many people mentioned this at these rallies. You go to these things and it's kind of like an oldies concert. I mean, it's not hostile.
George Saunders
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
George Saunders
