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With fiction, and also with nonfiction that you can take your time doing, you have a much better chance of reaching across the divide and connecting with somebody who is opposed to you on some things. They're opposed to you on one axis, which is politics, but if you go over the axis called puppies, you might find some common ground.

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
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Connecting
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Nonfiction

More quotes by George Saunders

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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
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In my case, when I am trying to be kind I often default in a sort of toothless loving-all stance that is, actually, not kind, because it is not truthful.
George Saunders
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People who've written about Abraham Lincoln's writing emphasize how logical he was. His writing was a syllogistic tool. He would say, if A, then B, and he would reason through it. His late writing especially is so tight and so beautifully reasoned.
George Saunders
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I'm a big lover of America. I love the people, but also the weird berms, the strange little high schools tucked away in different places, and just the whole geography and the psycho­logical apparatus of Americans.
George Saunders
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The story sometimes writes you into a corner.
George Saunders
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When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn't see it. He can't. He's average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.
George Saunders
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I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was a young parent, and something opened in me. That's the highest aspiration.
George Saunders
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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.
George Saunders
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Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.
George Saunders
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My understanding of kindness is that we are hoping to be truly beneficial in every situation, and that this desire means a whole suite of things: being nicer, sure, but also being more aware, more present, more articulate, more fearless, less habituated, etc., etc. And sometimes even being firm, or having an edge, or even being angry.
George Saunders
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I knew if I evoked that stuff too easily or gratuitously, as a way of assuaging my fears of not being edgy or whatever, the writing would fall apart. This book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was going to have to have some earnestness in it.
George Saunders
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My artistic approach is that you're supposed to be a little baffled.
George Saunders
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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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I was a big and un-ironic fan of Dear Abby when I was a kid in Chicago. I think I sort of internalized her. So I have this inner Abby: cranky, proper, folksy yet scathing, with a beehive hairdo. But that's my issue.
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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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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If you want to be good, all you've got to do is be good.
George Saunders
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The one thing I noticed retroactively was that the energy at those Trump rallies was off the charts compared to the Hillary Clinton rallies. The Bernie Sanders energy was as good, gentler, but there was a real passion there.
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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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