Quote

I don't know about transformation. But scientifically you can say: Well, it doesn't seem to hurt anybody. Personally I've been cheered by books at really critical moments. That much I believe.

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
Really
Doesn
Scientifically
Moments
Transformation
Seems
Personally
Wells
Critical
Book
Anybody
Well
Seem
Much
Hurt
Believe
Books
Cheered

More quotes by George Saunders

Image
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.
George Saunders
Image
I try to keep my artistic opinions not so much to myself but on myself.
George Saunders
Image
Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.
George Saunders
Image
It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.
George Saunders
Image
Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.
George Saunders
Image
Monologues, in some ways, are the most scientific descriptions of consciousness and even of gatherings.
George Saunders
Image
I had an experience a few years ago where I was on a plane in which one of the engines went out. I couldn't even remember my name. I was just repeating the word no over and over.
George Saunders
Image
You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.
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
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.
George Saunders
Image
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
Image
The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness.
George Saunders
Image
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
Image
For me, when I'm coming up to a place where I have to make somebody up, it's almost like driving and taking your hands off the wheel.
George Saunders
Image
I don't feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.
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've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.
George Saunders
Image
I would say one thing writing this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] did for me was underscore the fact that this issue [all men are created equal] has never been properly addressed and it hasn't gone away.
George Saunders
Image
That's one of the reasons I take a lot of consolation in fiction. You have years to work on it. I think that allows you to reach for the best part of your reader instead of a lot of the internet stuff, in which you're kind of reaching for the worst or the most shallow part of your reader.
George Saunders
Image
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.
George Saunders