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I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.

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
Nothing
Feel
Banal
Feels
Happen
Interesting
Happens
Persons
Person
Everything

More quotes by George Saunders

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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.
George Saunders
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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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So many people mentioned this at these rallies. You go to these things and it's kind of like an oldies concert. I mean, it's not hostile.
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It's so ironic that you often hear these right-wing people talking about the Constitution.
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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.
George Saunders
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Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.
George Saunders
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Whole idea is really intriguing to me. If you took snapshots of ourselves throughout the day, the way that our mind is twisting and turning, then at the moment of death, the mind would be twisting and turning in the same way. But the Buddhists say it's super-sized because there's no bodily damper on it.
George Saunders
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I've had that my whole career. People were always hedging around the question of: Why are you so dark? What happened to you?
George Saunders
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Success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it... Err in the direction of kindness.
George Saunders
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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
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Social media sometimes feels like a vehicle for one-dimensional sniping, more than true criticism.
George Saunders
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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
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In the reason that the contrast between the absolute and the relative is so terrible is because we believe so fully in ourselves as permanent, continuous, and central. I feel insane saying this, but if one weren't so deluded about the permanent reality of the self, a lot of this pain would actually lessen.
George Saunders
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I think that feels like it to me. I mean whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.
George Saunders
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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
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What's really baffling to me is the way that the technology has risen up to help us become more materialistic.
George Saunders
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Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.
George Saunders
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What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
George Saunders
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What I'm primarily saying,' he says, 'is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response. Gratitude, and being careful never to make the same mistake twice.
George Saunders
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In fiction, conceptualizing, I've found, produces dull and over-controlled text.
George Saunders