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The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness.
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
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Rooms
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Happiness
Inversely
Living
Proportional
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Fictional
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Enjoyed
Years
Number
More quotes by George Saunders
We have to move toward specificity, intelligence, facts, proof, and mutual affection. What I think people have to do now is be very, very assertive about the utter essentiality of intellectual undertakings.
George Saunders
If you're going to make an emotional connection with somebody, whether it's in the story or in the world, there's a certain amount of self-acceptance that is required.
George Saunders
I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time.
George Saunders
I was a straight arrow, a control freak. I didn't do drugs or drink, and this was the '70s. I didn't like the loss of control. Which isn't exactly right, because I didn't know what happened when you did drugs.
George Saunders
I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.
George Saunders
I don't feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.
George Saunders
Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.
George Saunders
I have a lot of theories about the beneficial effects of fiction, but I'm always trying to get away from them a little bit.
George Saunders
I don't mind being criticized intelligently although I don't love it.
George Saunders
The bottom line for me is that life is short and art is long.
George Saunders
There are things that are shadow sides of the creative energy that are negative and all that kind of stuff. The only thing that I say to myself is, in the spirit of that quote from the Gnostic Gospels: Writing is a way to let all that stuff out into the sun.
George Saunders
It really strikes me how much of your energy in America, especially if you're from a working back-ground, is spent just keeping your head above water. It really saps your grace and your strength.
George Saunders
When we talk about adversity, this is the moment when character really gets tested. When things aren't going the way you want and you can't see anyway that they're going to go the way you want. That's kind of when those old virtues really become valuable and vulnerable also.
George Saunders
To understand any plea for further consideration of a group you don't know anything about to be some form of, quote, political correctness. These things are bubbling right under us.
George Saunders
Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain.
George Saunders
I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was a young parent, and something opened in me. That's the highest aspiration.
George Saunders
Success is like a mountain in front of you that keeps growing. If you're not careful, it will take up your whole life.
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
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.
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I see that being looked at askance as a form of elitism now, which is really scary.
George Saunders
