Quote

There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.

George Saunders

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

George Saunders
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: December 2
Essayist
Fantasy Author
Geological Engineer
Geophysicist
Journalist
Novelist
Professor
Prosaist
Short Story Writer
Teacher
Amarillo
Texas
Long
Losing
Phase
Really
Begin
Wondering
Life
Watches
Phases
Watch
Curiosity
Goes
Decide
Stop
Lows
Wonder
Tired
Comes
Continue

More quotes by George Saunders

Image
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.
George Saunders
Image
I'm a big lover of America. I love the people, but also the weird berms, the strange little high schools tucked away in different places, and just the whole geography and the psycho­logical apparatus of Americans.
George Saunders
Image
Intelligent, heartfelt stories that tell a whole new set of truths about growing up American. Julie Orringer writes with virtuosity and depth about the fears, cruelties, and humiliations of childhood, but then does that rarest, and more difficult, thing: writes equally beautifully about the moments of victory and transcendence.
George Saunders
Image
Toni Morrison seems to have a lot of faith in people - that's what I mean by gentle power.
George Saunders
Image
Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.
George Saunders
Image
The main thing a childhood in the Church did for me, I think, was set up the universe as a moral system. Once you've seen it that way, it always seems that way.
George Saunders
Image
I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.
George Saunders
Image
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
Image
One of the inspiring things about Susan Sarandon career is that there's a quality of real fearlessness in it - you seem to be in it for the challenge and the experience.
George Saunders
Image
For me, things were either very sullied or very pure, very controlled or very under-controlled.
George Saunders
Image
I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.
George Saunders
Image
The beginning [of Lincoln in the Bardo] is strange, and I did a lot of work calibrating that so that a reader with a certain level of patience would get through it and in the nick of time start to figure out what was going on. In a short book, you can do that.
George Saunders
Image
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.
George Saunders
Image
I don't mind being criticized intelligently although I don't love it.
George Saunders
Image
I think that feels like it to me. I mean whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.
George Saunders
Image
A culture's ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.
George Saunders
Image
The best thing we can bring to any fight is a calm and compassionate mind.
George Saunders
Image
All storytelling is kind of that - there's a bit of text that you put pressure on that spits out some desire that a character has and then you follow that. The other part is that every scene raises an expectation in the reader's mind - that's part of its job is to make you look in and be curious.
George Saunders
Image
It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.
George Saunders
Image
I'm repledging myself to human-scale values. As a fiction writer, the best data comes through the senses and is then processed through many revisions. We have to learn to be intelligent assessors of the data coming in to us and what it's doing to our mental process.
George Saunders