Quote

You go to the marketplace and there are seventeen consciousnesses moving in and out. Sometimes you want the same shirt that I want, and our thought bubbles collide a bit and that makes plot.

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
Consciousness
Bits
Collide
Moving
Seventeen
Makes
Marketplace
Thought
Bubbles
Sometimes
Shirt
Shirts
Plot

More quotes by George Saunders

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I think the biggest single issue is income inequity and what this is doing to the good old American dream. This and corporatism - this delusional idea that shareholder value outweighs everything else.
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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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My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period and what you're really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces - trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work.
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It seemed to me, in some way, especially when you're looking back at distant historical events, the Truth with a capital T is kind of the juxtaposition of all the many, many, many truths that seem true to people at the time.
George Saunders
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I think kindness is a sort of gateway virtue - having that simple aspiration can get you into deep water very quickly - in a good way.
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I'm repledging myself to human-scale values. As a fiction writer, the best data comes through the senses and is then processed through many revisions. We have to learn to be intelligent assessors of the data coming in to us and what it's doing to our mental process.
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When you're out there in America, meeting with regular people, it's a pretty mellow, relaxed, kind-hearted country. The direction from the top, from the President, is following mean-spirited tendencies: fear and undue caution and distrust of the other, so it's very depressing.
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What I'm primarily saying,' he says, 'is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response. Gratitude, and being careful never to make the same mistake twice.
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Life is short, very short, and what are we doing here if not trying to become more generous and loving?
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Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.
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To understand any plea for further consideration of a group you don't know anything about to be some form of, quote, political correctness. These things are bubbling right under us.
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We have to move toward specificity, intelligence, facts, proof, and mutual affection. What I think people have to do now is be very, very assertive about the utter essentiality of intellectual undertakings.
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.
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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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I'm not a natural criticizer - I prefer to like and praise and so on.
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As a fiction writer, one of things you learn is God lives in specificity. You know, human kindness is increased as we pursue specificity.
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The book says [Lincoln in the Bardo],I really need this sci-fi device of a ghost inhabiting another person. You say okay kind of begrudgingly. So the structure seemed informed by need and efficiency.
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Being in church so often, spending those hours sitting in front of a highly symbolic array of objects, hearing those beautiful texts - it teaches a kid that there are important truths beyond the literal ones, and that we have ways to access those truths that are, let's say, super-rational.
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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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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.
George Saunders