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I was a big and un-ironic fan of Dear Abby when I was a kid in Chicago. I think I sort of internalized her. So I have this inner Abby: cranky, proper, folksy yet scathing, with a beehive hairdo. But that's my issue.
George Saunders
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George Saunders
Age: 65
Born: 1958
Born: December 2
Essayist
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More quotes by George Saunders
All traditions are also full of meanness for the sake of meanness.
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
The beginning [of Lincoln in the Bardo] is strange, and I did a lot of work calibrating that so that a reader with a certain level of patience would get through it and in the nick of time start to figure out what was going on. In a short book, you can do that.
George Saunders
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
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.
George Saunders
It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.
George Saunders
I still believe that capitalism is too harsh and I believe that, even within that, there is a lot of satisfaction and beauty if you happen to be one of the lucky ones, although that doesn't eradicate the reality of the suffering. It's all true at once, kind of humming and sublime.
George Saunders
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
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
The word 'funny' is a bit like the word 'love' - we don't have enough words to describe the many varieties.
George Saunders
As a kid, I had a real fascination with perverse, off-color, and kind of risky things, and I also had a very sanctimonious Catholic, purist side.
George Saunders
Stay alert. The big moral crossroads in your life may not come labeled as such.
George Saunders
The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.
George Saunders
It's one thing to be a perfectionist when you're alone, but when you're trying to make it work in an ensemble that's a whole different deal.
George Saunders
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.
George Saunders
I don't mind being criticized intelligently although I don't love it.
George Saunders
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
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.
George Saunders
Your first responsibility is to yourself and to your own goodness of heart.
George Saunders
What really interests me, on a deeper level, is how our information is coming to us in some kind of messed up way that is making us idiotic. I don't think we've become more idiotic than we always were, but I think the information transfer is funky. The shorthand of it is that social media is making us mentally insane.
George Saunders
