Quote

I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.

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
Start
Understand
Bearings
Form
Extending
Kind
Somehow
Something
Short
Like
Lose
Loses
Beauty

More quotes by George Saunders

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I was thinking about the legacy of ghosts in fiction, and specifically the moral power of those Dickensian ghosts. Because a ghost can be a very powerful but also manipulative element.
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I have nothing. My model is I have nothing figured out, and I'm starting with some little nugget and hoping that it will talk back to me enough to let it grow.
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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.
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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.
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I attended Catholic school. We received a great education from the nuns. ... Also, guilt. Guilt and a feeling of never being satisfied with what you've done. And a sense that you are inadequate and a big phony. All useful for a writer. I'm always being edited by my inner nun.
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What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.
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Err in the direction of kindness.
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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?
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The demographics are changing - and so what? Citizenship is a question of certain agreed-upon values and that is that. Do we believe that? I think at heart we do.
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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
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In a story, for example, you'll start off with a character who is a little bit of a cartoon. That's not satisfying and you start revising. And as you revise you always are making it better by being specific and by observing more closely, which actually is really the same as saying you love your characters. The close observation equals love of them.
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I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.
George Saunders
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I do find the values in A Christmas Carol significant. It is important not to be mean and stingy and not to give up love for money.
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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.
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You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.
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.
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You don't want to be that parent - the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks - especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town.
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It really strikes me how much of your energy in America, especially if you're from a working back-ground, is spent just keeping your head above water. It really saps your grace and your strength.
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It seemed to me, in some way, especially when you're looking back at distant historical events, the Truth with a capital T is kind of the juxtaposition of all the many, many, many truths that seem true to people at the time.
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I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.
George Saunders