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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: 66
Born: 1958
Born: December 2
Essayist
Fantasy Author
Geological Engineer
Geophysicist
Journalist
Novelist
Professor
Prosaist
Short Story Writer
Teacher
Amarillo
Texas
Years
Number
Couple
Rooms
Numbers
Happiness
Inversely
Living
Proportional
House
Fictional
True
Enjoyed

More quotes by George Saunders

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For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.
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Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.
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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.
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Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.
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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.
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Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by 'The New Yorker.'
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I would say one thing writing this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] did for me was underscore the fact that this issue [all men are created equal] has never been properly addressed and it hasn't gone away.
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The internet kind of feels like happiness sometimes, however. It feels like stimulation.
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Equality has always been extant but some of us just didn't know it.
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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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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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The word 'funny' is a bit like the word 'love' - we don't have enough words to describe the many varieties.
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Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.
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That underscored this idea that when we're reading a book or writing a book, you're in an act of co-creation. The reader and the writer are both trying to dress up and present their best selves and then there's that moment, when suddenly, as a reader, you're not exactly you anymore, and likewise, as a writer, you're not really you.
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With fiction, and also with nonfiction that you can take your time doing, you have a much better chance of reaching across the divide and connecting with somebody who is opposed to you on some things. They're opposed to you on one axis, which is politics, but if you go over the axis called puppies, you might find some common ground.
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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.
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Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.
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In fiction, conceptualizing, I've found, produces dull and over-controlled text.
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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.
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I'm turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don't have an infinite number of years left and if there's anything you want to say or represent, it's time to try it.
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