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I often think about image, and image is something that - but in truth, the real artistic process, as I've understood it, is 95 percent intuitive, like seat-of-the-pants, at-the-moment decisions that you can't even explain, you know?
George Saunders
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George Saunders
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: December 2
Essayist
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Amarillo
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More quotes by George Saunders
The bottom line for me is that life is short and art is long.
George Saunders
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.
George Saunders
The thing I've discovered that is a help is that there isn't a simple virtue or a simple vice. They're always connected. If you have Tendency A, that you loathe, you can almost be sure that Tendency B, which you love, is somehow connected to it.
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
So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go.
George Saunders
I think if someone could demonstrate to me that fiction did no good, I would still do it, because I think it does good for me.
George Saunders
Kindness can mean a lot of different things. In this case, I felt I had to present his [Donald Trump's] supporters in as fair a light as possible - many of them hadn't been interviewed before and that entailed some interviewer-courtesy in the editing and so on.
George Saunders
Of course there's objective truth, but when we're looking at people's accounts of it, it seems the real truth lies in the accretion of all these different versions.
George Saunders
Stay alert. The big moral crossroads in your life may not come labeled as such.
George Saunders
Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.
George Saunders
I watched a bunch of kids movies on Christmas. I was kind of joking with our family by asking, Is anyone allowed to die in a kid's movie anymore?
George Saunders
Some of our writers are starting to incorporate elements of social media, etc. in the work itself, which is all for the good, I think - finding new ways of being poetic.
George Saunders
I'm starting to withdraw from [technology] as much as I can. I don't do much of the social media stuff. Like, if I'm on Facebook, it changes my relation to the real world in a way that makes me feel sick - almost like I've had too much sugar or something.
George Saunders
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.
George Saunders
In the moment of reading, the writer comes up to the surface and the reader comes up to the surface and they kiss, like two fish. That actually does happen.
George Saunders
Every writer knows that when you're imitating somebody - you know, you're sounding like Faulkner - you're doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn't Faulkneresque.
George Saunders
Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by 'The New Yorker.'
George Saunders
As a fiction writer, one of things you learn is God lives in specificity. You know, human kindness is increased as we pursue specificity.
George Saunders
Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.
George Saunders
Some of Buddhist texts say that, in the moment after you die, you think of New Jersey and you go to New Jersey or you think of 1820 and you go to 1820. Also, all your sort of inner-symbology gets writ large. So, if you're a Christian, you see Christian iconography.
George Saunders
