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In fiction, conceptualizing, I've found, produces dull and over-controlled text.
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
Conceptualizing
Text
Produces
Controlled
Dull
Produce
Fiction
Found
More quotes by George Saunders
The main thing a childhood in the Church did for me, I think, was set up the universe as a moral system. Once you've seen it that way, it always seems that way.
George Saunders
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.
George Saunders
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.
George Saunders
If you're going to make an emotional connection with somebody, whether it's in the story or in the world, there's a certain amount of self-acceptance that is required.
George Saunders
One of the principals of composition, I would say, in fiction, is you want to do what you can do a lot of. You want to do what you're enthusiastic about and what rings your bell. In this case, almost every decision I made was on that basis.
George Saunders
The switch that I'd like to throw on is the one that says, Look, you're a human being whose mind is every bit as active as anybody else's. Your experiences are just as real. For that matter, even if they're even if they're crazy, they're valid. They occurred in this world so they're valid topics for literature.
George Saunders
If death is in the room, it's pretty interesting. But I would also say that I'm interested in getting myself to believe that it's going to happen to me. I'm interested in it, because if you're not, you're nuts. It's really de facto what we're here to find out about.
George Saunders
I have nothing. My model is I have nothing figured out, and I'm starting with some little nugget and hoping that it will talk back to me enough to let it grow.
George Saunders
You can say you're a liberal and everybody laughs and it's a good time.
George Saunders
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.
George Saunders
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
If I go to the coffee shop and have a nice interaction with the barista, I don't know what that does for world peace, but we have to assume that in the great basket of goodness maybe that's one little micron or one little neutron that you've put in there.
George Saunders
Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.
George Saunders
Whole idea is really intriguing to me. If you took snapshots of ourselves throughout the day, the way that our mind is twisting and turning, then at the moment of death, the mind would be twisting and turning in the same way. But the Buddhists say it's super-sized because there's no bodily damper on it.
George Saunders
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
When we talk about adversity, this is the moment when character really gets tested. When things aren't going the way you want and you can't see anyway that they're going to go the way you want. That's kind of when those old virtues really become valuable and vulnerable also.
George Saunders
I grew up in Chicago on the South Side, and had a ton of freedom, just did whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. At the risk of sounding dopey, I would say it was blissful.
George Saunders
Kindness can mean a lot of different things. In this case, I felt I had to present his [Donald Trump's] supporters in as fair a light as possible - many of them hadn't been interviewed before and that entailed some interviewer-courtesy in the editing and so on.
George Saunders
Whatever your supposed politics are - left, right - if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to the occasion and feel the human pain in a way that they might not if it was presented in a more conceptual way.
George Saunders
In the moment of reading, the writer comes up to the surface and the reader comes up to the surface and they kiss, like two fish. That actually does happen.
George Saunders
