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All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.

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
Writing
Mantra
Contributes
Service
Along
Unless
Emotion
Write
Anything

More quotes by George Saunders

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We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.
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What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.
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Err in the direction of kindness.
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I see that being looked at askance as a form of elitism now, which is really scary.
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We've got a real problem with social media that we didn't know we were going to have. It's almost like the demons have gotten out of the box.
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It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.
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When I think about what fiction does morally, I'm happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities - sort of fragmented.
George Saunders
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Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.
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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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Toni Morrison seems to have a lot of faith in people - that's what I mean by gentle power.
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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.
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And I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it - which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course.
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While I'm doing [writing], I don't feel it.I don't think that's a failing. I think it's just a feature. Like, a feature of oneself.
George Saunders
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As a writer I'm essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.
George Saunders
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I watched a bunch of kids movies on Christmas. I was kind of joking with our family by asking, Is anyone allowed to die in a kid's movie anymore?
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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
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What I really found myself interested in was the idea that our minds our so powerful and when we're living, the mind is dampened by the body. As crazy as our minds can get, they're only so crazy because they're physically housed.
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I love the idea that more people would read short fiction. I think it's such a humanizing form. It softens the boundaries between people.
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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.
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I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it's a nice way to neutralize that polarization.
George Saunders