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Whatever you love, that will be an influence. It just will. So in effect the young writer's job is: go out and find some stuff to love.

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
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Stuff
Young
Find
Effect
Love
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Influence

More quotes by George Saunders

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Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by 'The New Yorker.'
George Saunders
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I think the wave of social media rejection is coming. I think there will be a big reaction against it. It's just like sugar- - mean, I loved it as a kid.
George Saunders
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People who've written about Abraham Lincoln's writing emphasize how logical he was. His writing was a syllogistic tool. He would say, if A, then B, and he would reason through it. His late writing especially is so tight and so beautifully reasoned.
George Saunders
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If you want to be good, all you've got to do is be good.
George Saunders
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The millions or billions of micro decisions that you're going to make, that's what will determine who you are as a writer, not you deciding in advance.
George Saunders
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I'm not a big fan of my books going on cross-country road trips. They get arrogant and, next thing, start aspiring to become 'large-print' books. I say, let them stay home and be regular small-print books.
George Saunders
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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.
George Saunders
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I love the idea that more people would read short fiction. I think it's such a humanizing form. It softens the boundaries between people.
George Saunders
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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
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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
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I sometimes imagine a great writer as a sort of God-surrogate: the writer is doing his or her human-best to emulate what God might think of is, if God was inclined to observe some human beings and present their activities in the form of a narrative.
George Saunders
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So, good news/bad news: good news that I'm progressing bad news that life is short and art is long.
George Saunders
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My mind has an obsessive, neurotic quality, but I also have a very hard work ethic. I know that a lot of people think, oh, you have a wild imagination. I don't, really. If ten people are sitting around and someone says, Hey complete this sentence in a funny way, I'm never ahead of the pack.
George Saunders
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We have not been energetic enough - white people haven't - in pursuing racial equity.
George Saunders
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I actually believe that a lot of what people call originality has to do with persistence in the craft.
George Saunders
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I don't feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.
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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Monologues, in some ways, are the most scientific descriptions of consciousness and even of gatherings.
George Saunders
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Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.
George Saunders
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When we talk about adversity, this is the moment when character really gets tested. When things aren't going the way you want and you can't see anyway that they're going to go the way you want. That's kind of when those old virtues really become valuable and vulnerable also.
George Saunders