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The old and honorable American notion, that a person who works hard should be able to live in freedom and security, with dignity - seems to have taken on a secondary status.
George Saunders
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George Saunders
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: December 2
Essayist
Fantasy Author
Geological Engineer
Geophysicist
Journalist
Novelist
Professor
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Short Story Writer
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Amarillo
Texas
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Freedom
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American
More quotes by George Saunders
[Lincoln in the Bardo] is not a long book. And that meant I could obsess over it and live in it both backwards and forwards and hyper-control everything.
George Saunders
I've had that my whole career. People were always hedging around the question of: Why are you so dark? What happened to you?
George Saunders
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
The one thing about A Christmas Carol that always bothers me is that Cratchit is so sweet and perfect. He's like an Ivy League kid who just is labeled poor. He doesn't have any bad habits. He's never cranky with his kids.
George Saunders
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.
George Saunders
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
We all think we know what happens after death. But maybe it's going to be not only weird but also dorky and comic and inconsistent.
George Saunders
If I'm writing a story and you're reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process.
George Saunders
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.
George Saunders
I like [Barak] Obama. I like him. So how far does rationality help to persuade anybody? You know, I'm not so sure.
George Saunders
Compassion doesn't have to be weak or enabling it can also be quite bold.
George Saunders
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.
George Saunders
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
The word 'funny' is a bit like the word 'love' - we don't have enough words to describe the many varieties.
George Saunders
I think this is the other big issue that is not going away: Do we really believe that bit in the Constitution or not? I think we do.
George Saunders
Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.
George Saunders
In the moment of reading, the writer comes up to the surface and the reader comes up to the surface and they kiss, like two fish. That actually does happen.
George Saunders
It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations. But I can look back at the way I thought and felt even as a little kid and there was a lot of wonder there, and openness to the many sides of life.
George Saunders
It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.
George Saunders
Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.
George Saunders
