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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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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
Mind
Imagination
Sentences
Really
Quality
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Funny
Wild
Obsessive
Never
Someone
Ahead
Pack
Think
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Ten
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Thinking
Also
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Hard
Sitting
Sentence
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More quotes by 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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I read to make myself feel awake.
George Saunders
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For me, things were either very sullied or very pure, very controlled or very under-controlled.
George Saunders
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I attended Catholic school. We received a great education from the nuns. ... Also, guilt. Guilt and a feeling of never being satisfied with what you've done. And a sense that you are inadequate and a big phony. All useful for a writer. I'm always being edited by my inner nun.
George Saunders
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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.
George Saunders
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The bottom line for me is that life is short and art is long.
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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What evil does first in the world, maybe, is distract us from our pursuit of goodness.
George Saunders
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From the beginning [of the Lincoln in the Bardo], I actually had it in mind not to write a novel. I'd kind of gotten past that point where I felt bad for never having written a novel, even to where I felt really good about it, like I was a real purist.
George Saunders
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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
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I don't feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.
George Saunders
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I don't tend to work directly from life, except in trying to mimic or match the outlines of its insanity. In other words, when I live through something, I just try to say to myself, OK, remember this - life is really this crazy or scary or beautiful or surprising - so try to 'get at' that in your stories.
George Saunders
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I'm such a baby if I even get a flu.
George Saunders
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All storytelling is kind of that - there's a bit of text that you put pressure on that spits out some desire that a character has and then you follow that. The other part is that every scene raises an expectation in the reader's mind - that's part of its job is to make you look in and be curious.
George Saunders
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I guess: People who are comfortable enough with reality to allow other sorts of realities and other mindsets to just be, and then to regard these with real interest and joy [and the joy appears in the prose quality itself].
George Saunders
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We all think we know what happens after death. But maybe it's going to be not only weird but also dorky and comic and inconsistent.
George Saunders
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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
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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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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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The great American denial riff is that you can do whatever you like and you always triumph at the end. The world is saying no, you can do what you like, but there are consequences. And maturity is to be able to turn to the consequences and accept them.
George Saunders