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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
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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
Good
Life
Faulkner
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Imitating
Sounding
Writer
Somebody
Pretty
Every
More quotes by George Saunders
Kindness, it turns out, is hard - it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, EVERYTHING.
George Saunders
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
The scariest thought in the world is that someday I'll wake up and realize I've been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual.
George Saunders
The book says [Lincoln in the Bardo],I really need this sci-fi device of a ghost inhabiting another person. You say okay kind of begrudgingly. So the structure seemed informed by need and efficiency.
George Saunders
If death is in the room, it's pretty interesting. But I would also say that I'm interested in getting myself to believe that it's going to happen to me. I'm interested in it, because if you're not, you're nuts. It's really de facto what we're here to find out about.
George Saunders
The story sometimes writes you into a corner.
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
When I think about what fiction does morally, I'm happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities - sort of fragmented.
George Saunders
We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.
George Saunders
I don't like that new age posture where you kind of tilt your head. I don't like that posture right now. I want something a little more confident and more sure of the values that we're defending, which are the old ones, love and empathy and patience and tolerance and civility. Not to get into politics or anything.
George Saunders
My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you've spent your day.
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
I came to writing kind of late. I was an engineer, and the one thing I've learned is that you have to steer a project in the direction of the maximum fun for you. You could say lively energy, or you have to try to be intrigued. Basically, if you were a musician and you were playing joylessly, nobody would want to hear you.
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
My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period and what you're really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces - trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work.
George Saunders
The writer, in order to proceed, is theoretically trying to predict where his complex skein of language and image has left his reader, who he has likely never met and who is actually thousands of readers.
George Saunders
My heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.
George Saunders
Someone told me once - I mean I said, Is it ok that I don't really know what the three-act structure is? And he said, It's basically: Act 1: a guy climbs up a tree Act 2: people come and throw stuff at him Act 3: he gets down.
George Saunders
What's really baffling to me is the way that the technology has risen up to help us become more materialistic.
George Saunders
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.
George Saunders
