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In my case, when I am trying to be kind I often default in a sort of toothless loving-all stance that is, actually, not kind, because it is not truthful.

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
Often
Stance
Trying
Default
Kind
Truthful
Loving
Case
Cases
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Actually
Toothless

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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.
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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.
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I was trained in seismic prospecting. We'd drill a deep hole and put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill.
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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.
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It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed to know to answer all the questions of the universe. Wouldn't that be freaky? Whereas the probability is high that there is a vast reality that we have no way to perceive, that's actually bearing down on us now and influencing everything.
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If I go to the coffee shop and have a nice interaction with the barista, I don't know what that does for world peace, but we have to assume that in the great basket of goodness maybe that's one little micron or one little neutron that you've put in there.
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A country doesn't need a businessman to run it: it needs a heartful, worldly, compassionate leader.
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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.
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The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.
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So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go.
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I guess: People who are comfortable enough with reality to allow other sorts of realities and other mindsets to just be, and then to regard these with real interest and joy [and the joy appears in the prose quality itself].
George Saunders
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Toni Morrison seems to have a lot of faith in people - that's what I mean by gentle power.
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I'm a control freak. I'm defensive. And I'm an egomaniac. That's true about me.
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.
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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.
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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.
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For me, things were either very sullied or very pure, very controlled or very under-controlled.
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I see this quality [real interest and joy] in the work of [Pavel] Chekhov, of course, and [Alexei] Tolstoy and really just about any great writer.
George Saunders
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I was a big and un-ironic fan of Dear Abby when I was a kid in Chicago. I think I sort of internalized her. So I have this inner Abby: cranky, proper, folksy yet scathing, with a beehive hairdo. But that's my issue.
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