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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.

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
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More quotes by George Saunders

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Of course there's objective truth, but when we're looking at people's accounts of it, it seems the real truth lies in the accretion of all these different versions.
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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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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I think that's one of the maybe under-discussed aspects of process - the difference between a good writing day and a bad one is the quality of the split-second decisions you made.
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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Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.
George Saunders
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I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil.
George Saunders
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Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.
George Saunders
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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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You can say you're a liberal and everybody laughs and it's a good time.
George Saunders
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There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.
George Saunders
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Life is short, very short, and what are we doing here if not trying to become more generous and loving?
George Saunders
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I've found that my first drafts are not so special. But the more I work on them, the better they get. They are more unique and defensible.
George Saunders
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For me, when I'm coming up to a place where I have to make somebody up, it's almost like driving and taking your hands off the wheel.
George Saunders
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Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others).
George Saunders
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Being in church so often, spending those hours sitting in front of a highly symbolic array of objects, hearing those beautiful texts - it teaches a kid that there are important truths beyond the literal ones, and that we have ways to access those truths that are, let's say, super-rational.
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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What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
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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In real life, when you have an emotional experience, it's never just because of the thing that's been said. There's the backstory. It's like [Ernest] Hemingway's iceberg theory - the current emotional moment is the tip of the iceberg and all of the past is the seven-eighths of the iceberg that's underwater.
George Saunders