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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

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George Saunders
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: December 2
Essayist
Fantasy Author
Geological Engineer
Geophysicist
Journalist
Novelist
Professor
Prosaist
Short Story Writer
Teacher
Amarillo
Texas
Always
Christmas
Cranky
Never
Habit
Carols
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Sweet
Ivy
Poor
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More quotes by George Saunders

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I think that's one of the maybe under-discussed aspects of process - the difference between a good writing day and a bad one is the quality of the split-second decisions you made.
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It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.
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I watched a bunch of kids movies on Christmas. I was kind of joking with our family by asking, Is anyone allowed to die in a kid's movie anymore?
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It's on us to investigate ourselves for any lingering sense that we are 'giving' equality. We are not. It is already given. And not by us.
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Whole swaths of the book [Lincoln in the Bardo] are made up of verbatim quotes from various historical sources, which I cut up and rearranged to form part of the narrative.
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I guess what I'm trying to say is that whatever weirdness was going to be in there, I felt, had to be earned. And it had to be required by the emotional needs of the book.
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What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
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The cool parts - the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as 'the Vegas of the Middle East' or 'the Venice of the Middle East' or 'the Disney World of the Middle East, if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert' - have been built in the last ten years.
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I was thinking about the legacy of ghosts in fiction, and specifically the moral power of those Dickensian ghosts. Because a ghost can be a very powerful but also manipulative element.
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The demographics are changing - and so what? Citizenship is a question of certain agreed-upon values and that is that. Do we believe that? I think at heart we do.
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I don't feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.
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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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For me, things were either very sullied or very pure, very controlled or very under-controlled.
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Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.
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All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.
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When I wrote that [Donald] Trump piece, I had this uncomfortable experience of sensing a lot of things that were nascent, that I couldn't quite articulate. And one of them was this move toward anti-intellectualism. An anti-love move, even.
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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.
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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.
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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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I turned 54 this year and I find myself feeling like I'm in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life - or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations.
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