Quote

The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.

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
Thinking
Process
Damaged
Jobs
Germs
Artist
Refined
Stories
Inherent
Intuit
May
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Conduit
Even
Mystery
Germ
Way
Sort
Midwife
Think
Story
Heightened

More quotes by George Saunders

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I've found that my first drafts are not so special. But the more I work on them, the better they get. They are more unique and defensible.
George Saunders
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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
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I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was a young parent, and something opened in me. That's the highest aspiration.
George Saunders
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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.
George Saunders
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When you're out there in America, meeting with regular people, it's a pretty mellow, relaxed, kind-hearted country. The direction from the top, from the President, is following mean-spirited tendencies: fear and undue caution and distrust of the other, so it's very depressing.
George Saunders
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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?
George Saunders
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In real life, when you have an emotional experience, it's never just because of the thing that's been said. There's the backstory. It's like [Ernest] Hemingway's iceberg theory - the current emotional moment is the tip of the iceberg and all of the past is the seven-eighths of the iceberg that's underwater.
George Saunders
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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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I've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.
George Saunders
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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
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If you want to be good, all you've got to do is be good.
George Saunders
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I don't really write beautifully naturally, unlike some people.
George Saunders
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Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.
George Saunders
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I think kindness is a sort of gateway virtue - having that simple aspiration can get you into deep water very quickly - in a good way.
George Saunders
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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.
George Saunders
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Your first responsibility is to yourself and to your own goodness of heart.
George Saunders
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Someone told me once - I mean I said, Is it ok that I don't really know what the three-act structure is? And he said, It's basically: Act 1: a guy climbs up a tree Act 2: people come and throw stuff at him Act 3: he gets down.
George Saunders
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There's a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him - or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn't have anything to do with his ego or his desire to 'be a good writer'.
George Saunders
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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.
George Saunders
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Whole swaths of the book [Lincoln in the Bardo] are made up of verbatim quotes from various historical sources, which I cut up and rearranged to form part of the narrative.
George Saunders