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My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you've spent your day.

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
Empathy
Spent
Depends
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Heart

More quotes by George Saunders

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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
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I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil.
George Saunders
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When I think about what fiction does morally, I'm happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities - sort of fragmented.
George Saunders
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The switch that I'd like to throw on is the one that says, Look, you're a human being whose mind is every bit as active as anybody else's. Your experiences are just as real. For that matter, even if they're even if they're crazy, they're valid. They occurred in this world so they're valid topics for literature.
George Saunders
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A country doesn't need a businessman to run it: it needs a heartful, worldly, compassionate leader.
George Saunders
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In fiction, conceptualizing, I've found, produces dull and over-controlled text.
George Saunders
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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
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I don't like that new age posture where you kind of tilt your head. I don't like that posture right now. I want something a little more confident and more sure of the values that we're defending, which are the old ones, love and empathy and patience and tolerance and civility. Not to get into politics or anything.
George Saunders
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We're in the transition between birth and death. But the one that people often know about is the transition between the moment of death and whatever comes next, so reincarnation or heaven or hell.
George Saunders
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The story sometimes writes you into a corner.
George Saunders
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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
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I see this quality [real interest and joy] in the work of [Pavel] Chekhov, of course, and [Alexei] Tolstoy and really just about any great writer.
George Saunders
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The one thing about A Christmas Carol that always bothers me is that Cratchit is so sweet and perfect. He's like an Ivy League kid who just is labeled poor. He doesn't have any bad habits. He's never cranky with his kids.
George Saunders
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I sometimes imagine a great writer as a sort of God-surrogate: the writer is doing his or her human-best to emulate what God might think of is, if God was inclined to observe some human beings and present their activities in the form of a narrative.
George Saunders
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All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.
George Saunders
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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
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My artistic approach is that you're supposed to be a little baffled.
George Saunders
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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
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It's so ironic that you often hear these right-wing people talking about the Constitution.
George Saunders
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Monologues, in some ways, are the most scientific descriptions of consciousness and even of gatherings.
George Saunders