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I think kindness is a sort of gateway virtue - having that simple aspiration can get you into deep water very quickly - in a good way.

George Saunders

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George Saunders
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: December 2
Essayist
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Journalist
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Amarillo
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More quotes by George Saunders

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If I find myself being too earnest and sentimental and hyperbolic and simplistic, which is definitely a tendency I have, then I bring in this perverse henchman.
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My heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.
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There's not a lot of whimsicality in the form, not a lot of indulgence allowed. Like when I was younger, I would sometimes go, Oh, every other section will be narrated by a chair. Or, It will be a double helix shape! That never really worked.
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The main thing a childhood in the Church did for me, I think, was set up the universe as a moral system. Once you've seen it that way, it always seems that way.
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I like [Barak] Obama. I like him. So how far does rationality help to persuade anybody? You know, I'm not so sure.
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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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We're in the transition between birth and death. But the one that people often know about is the transition between the moment of death and whatever comes next, so reincarnation or heaven or hell.
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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.
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While I'm doing [writing], I don't feel it.I don't think that's a failing. I think it's just a feature. Like, a feature of oneself.
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That underscored this idea that when we're reading a book or writing a book, you're in an act of co-creation. The reader and the writer are both trying to dress up and present their best selves and then there's that moment, when suddenly, as a reader, you're not exactly you anymore, and likewise, as a writer, you're not really you.
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Social media sometimes feels like a vehicle for one-dimensional sniping, more than true criticism.
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With fiction, and also with nonfiction that you can take your time doing, you have a much better chance of reaching across the divide and connecting with somebody who is opposed to you on some things. They're opposed to you on one axis, which is politics, but if you go over the axis called puppies, you might find some common ground.
George Saunders
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Err in the direction of kindness.
George Saunders
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You go to the marketplace and there are seventeen consciousnesses moving in and out. Sometimes you want the same shirt that I want, and our thought bubbles collide a bit and that makes plot.
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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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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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As a writer I'm essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.
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Stay alert. The big moral crossroads in your life may not come labeled as such.
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Success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it... Err in the direction of kindness.
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I don't use the word lightly, in fact, I don't use it at all, but Ben Marcus is a genius, one of the most daring, funny, morally engaged and brilliant writers, someone whose work truly makes a difference in the world. His prose is, for me, awareness objectified-he makes the word new and thus the world.
George Saunders