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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

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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
Like
Terrible
Wasn
Either
Guy
Keep
Knowingly
Thing
Confirm
Really
Rotten
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Normal

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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.
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When I write I know that I'm going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need.
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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.
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Equality has always been extant but some of us just didn't know it.
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Success is like a mountain in front of you that keeps growing. If you're not careful, it will take up your whole life.
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The cool parts - the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as 'the Vegas of the Middle East' or 'the Venice of the Middle East' or 'the Disney World of the Middle East, if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert' - have been built in the last ten years.
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The best thing we can bring to any fight is a calm and compassionate mind.
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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.
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I often wonder if there are certain areas of real life that are roped off, with a sign saying, Art, don't come in here. But that's maybe a deeper question.
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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.
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As a writer I'm essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.
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The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.
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I have lunch, flirt with some local grandmothers, undercut my flirting by crotching myself on the corner of a table as I leave. -- The Great Divider
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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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There's not a lot of whimsicality in the form, not a lot of indulgence allowed. Like when I was younger, I would sometimes go, Oh, every other section will be narrated by a chair. Or, It will be a double helix shape! That never really worked.
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The best thing that ever happened to me is that nothing happened in writing. I ended up working for engineering companies, and that's where I found my material, in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace. Being broke and tired, you don't come home your best self.
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When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn't see it. He can't. He's average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.
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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.
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It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.
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One of the revelations in that book [Lincoln in the Bardo] for me was this idea about citizenship. Even that word - citizenship - for someone my age, it makes me cringe. But, to me, the political space we're in now argues for a reboot of fairly simple ideas and the examination of the way that Americans have not been living into them.
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