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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.

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
Perverse
Sentimental
Earnest
Tendency
Tendencies
Hyperbolic
Definitely
Henchmen
Bring
Find
Simplistic

More quotes by George Saunders

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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.
George Saunders
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As a young kid I assumed that everybody was sort of on the same wavelength as I was and then I found out in a lot of small ways that that wasn't the case. It's sort of a mixed blessing. My mind is like a puppy. It goes all over. I guess writing fiction was a way of harnessing that. I could hook a puppy up to a treadmill and get something out of it.
George Saunders
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The mind is a machine that is constantly asking: What would I prefer? Close your eyes, refuse to move, and watch what your mind does. What it does is become discontent with that-which-is. A desire arises, you satisfy that desire, and another arises in its place.
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.
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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Intelligent, heartfelt stories that tell a whole new set of truths about growing up American. Julie Orringer writes with virtuosity and depth about the fears, cruelties, and humiliations of childhood, but then does that rarest, and more difficult, thing: writes equally beautifully about the moments of victory and transcendence.
George Saunders
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I've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.
George Saunders
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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
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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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The scariest thought in the world is that someday I'll wake up and realize I've been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual.
George Saunders
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My heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.
George Saunders
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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.
George Saunders
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I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.
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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More and more these days what I find myself doing in my stories is making a representation of goodness and a representation of evil and then having those two run at each other full-speed, like a couple of PeeWee football players, to see what happens. Who stays standing? Whose helmet goes flying off?
George Saunders
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My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you've spent your day.
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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Some of our writers are starting to incorporate elements of social media, etc. in the work itself, which is all for the good, I think - finding new ways of being poetic.
George Saunders
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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.
George Saunders
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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