Quote

The beginning [of Lincoln in the Bardo] is strange, and I did a lot of work calibrating that so that a reader with a certain level of patience would get through it and in the nick of time start to figure out what was going on. In a short book, you can do that.

George Saunders

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Start
Figure
Certain
Figures
Book
Beginning
Going
Reader
Work
Short
Bardo
Would
Level
Nick
Time
Levels
Lincoln
Strange
Patience

More quotes by George Saunders

Image
I think it is time for a new pride in the intellectual life, and a new impatience with people who take pride in ignorance, or somehow use elite to mean person who has taken the time to know and then are eager to dismiss, say, striving, or the notion that improving one's self out of difficult conditions is a noble thing.
George Saunders
Image
I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.
George Saunders
Image
I have lunch, flirt with some local grandmothers, undercut my flirting by crotching myself on the corner of a table as I leave. -- The Great Divider
George Saunders
Image
It's a big world, and I really like it.
George Saunders
Image
Err in the direction of kindness.
George Saunders
Image
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
Image
It's one thing to be a perfectionist when you're alone, but when you're trying to make it work in an ensemble that's a whole different deal.
George Saunders
Image
The greatest thing about writing a book is that at first it's all inchoate, but the more you work on it, the more the book teaches you its internal rules.
George Saunders
Image
I was a straight arrow, a control freak. I didn't do drugs or drink, and this was the '70s. I didn't like the loss of control. Which isn't exactly right, because I didn't know what happened when you did drugs.
George Saunders
Image
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.
George Saunders
Image
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.
George Saunders
Image
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.
George Saunders
Image
The story sometimes writes you into a corner.
George Saunders
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I don't like that new age posture where you kind of tilt your head. I don't like that posture right now. I want something a little more confident and more sure of the values that we're defending, which are the old ones, love and empathy and patience and tolerance and civility. Not to get into politics or anything.
George Saunders
Image
In Catholicism, we would say you're going to be judged, so therefore you should do better now. For me, Buddhism is somewhat more workable because instead of saying I have to do good, it says I have to notice what I'm actually doing.
George Saunders
Image
I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.
George Saunders
Image
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
Image
Equality has always been extant but some of us just didn't know it.
George Saunders