Top 100 George Saunders Quotes
#1. Writing a story I am just trying to find some little interesting thing to start out with: something small, even trivial. Preferably something that doesn't have a lot of thematic or political baggage - a little crumb that is interesting.
George Saunders
#2. My heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.
George Saunders
#3. 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
#4. There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.
George Saunders
#5. Oh, mansion shmansion. Did Gandhi's house have the largest outdoor trampoline in the tristate area? Did Jesus have a two-acre remote-controlled car track, with mountains to scale and a little village that lit up at night?
Not in his Bible.
George Saunders
#6. I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time.
George Saunders
#7. If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.
George Saunders
#8. She said America was a spoiled child ignorant of grief.
George Saunders
#9. Ma was out back, head in hands, weaving in and out of her heaped-up crap. It was both melodramatic and not. I mean, when Ma feels something deeply, that's what she does: melodrama. Which makes it, I guess, not melodrama?
George Saunders
#11. The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.
George Saunders
#12. A house on the park. He'd seen it a million times. And now was in it. It smelled of man sweat and spaghetti sauce and old books. Like a library where sweaty men went to cook spaghetti.
George Saunders
#13. We pretend to catch and eat more pretend bugs than could ever actually live in one cave. The number of pretend bugs we pretend to catch and eat would in reality basically fill a cave the size of our cave.
George Saunders
#14. Sucess is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it ... Err in the direction of kindness.
George Saunders
#15. 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
#16. I think something that I can't name about our media has made us move away from that kind of specificity and that kind of curiosity.
George Saunders
#17. If I'm writing a story and you're reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process.
George Saunders
#18. The cheeks of the sailors grew pale at the sight - and their eyes glistened with the gleam of the light - and the smoke in thick wreaths mounted higher and higher - Oh God it is fearful to perish by fire! Kunhardt
George Saunders
#19. I was trained in seismic prospecting. We'd drill a deep hole and put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill.
George Saunders
#20. If you want to explore a political idea in the highest possible way, you embody it in the personal, because that's something that no one can deny.
George Saunders
#21. Every writer knows that when you're imitating somebody - you know, you're sounding like Faulkner - you're doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn't Faulkneresque.
George Saunders
#22. I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.
George Saunders
#23. The young, Ayn Randish Republican that I was, discounted Vonnegut as one of them: A former hippie, maybe, or a proto-hippie, someone who, unlike me, wasn't earnest/tough/focused enough to be huge, classic, and utterly pure.
George Saunders
#24. The traveller must, of course, always be cautious of the overly broad generalisation. But I am an American, and a paucity of data does not stop me from making sweeping, vague, conceptual statements and, if necessary, following these statements up with troops.
George Saunders
#25. As I moved about the room I would encounter that silver wedge of a moon at this window or that, like some old beggar who wished to be invited in.
George Saunders
#28. Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.
George Saunders
#30. Think of how lovely it all could have been had anything gone right, and then I think: Oh heavens, why prolong it, I've no income now.
George Saunders
#31. 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
#32. If I can be more efficient, I'm actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.
George Saunders
#33. Rachel got up and did this happy little shuffle, like she was some cheerful farmer chick who'd just stepped outside to find the hick she was in love with coming up the road with a calf under his arm or whatever.
Why was she dancing? No reason.
Just alive, I guess.
George Saunders
#34. Do all the other things, the ambitious things-travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes ... but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness.
George Saunders
#35. My stories, I can understand them as a little toy that you wind up and you put it on the floor and it just goes under the coach. That I get. Beyond that, I'm a little lost.
George Saunders
#36. 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.
George Saunders
#37. The time he'd cheated on Syl, Syl had seen through him, broken off their engagement, and cheated on him with Charles, which had fried his ass possibly worse than any single other ass frying he'd ever had, in a life that, it recently seemed, was simply a series of escalating ass fries.
George Saunders
#38. [P]eople think of compassion as, like, kindness. The image comes to mind of some nice New Age guy bending to something with a look on his face like he's about to cry. And I don't think that's it. I think of it more as a quality of openness that comes with being in a state of unusual attentiveness.
George Saunders
#39. It should, as Chekhov said, prepare us for tenderness. And in this regard it starts, I think, with intention ... Our intention is to crack life open for just a second.
George Saunders
#40. And that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone's affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he'd ever
George Saunders
#41. I turned 54 this year and I find myself feeling like I'm in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life - or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations.
George Saunders
#43. The most hopeful thing in the stories, I hope, is wit. I make it up. If I make up a world in which we're ruled by big talking turds, it doesn't mean that we are. So you shouldn't feel depressed ...
George Saunders
#44. He seems to have a passable knowledge of how to pretend to churn butter.
George Saunders
#45. What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
George Saunders
#46. Suddenly absurdism wasn't an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort - and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.
George Saunders
#47. When I was a kid, I took 'The Brady Bunch' and 'The Partridge Family' very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.
George Saunders
#48. 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.
George Saunders
#49. I'm not a big fan of my books going on cross-country road trips. They get arrogant and, next thing, start aspiring to become 'large-print' books. I say, let them stay home and be regular small-print books.
George Saunders
#50. A story is a really weird art object that should contain life but not be enslaved by the banality.
George Saunders
#51. The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim.
George Saunders
#52. I'm very happy - if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I'm thrilled.
George Saunders
#53. The writer, in order to proceed, is theoretically trying to predict where his complex skein of language and image has left his reader, who he has likely never met and who is actually thousands of readers.
George Saunders
#54. I think even like Saddam Hussein or Hitler would wake up and say, "I think it's going to be a good day. I'm gonna do some really important work." And given their definition of good, they went out and did horrible things.
George Saunders
#55. Life is short, very short, and what are we doing here if not trying to become more generous and loving?
George Saunders
#56. The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness.
George Saunders
#57. He sent the trained dog that is his talent off in search of a fat glorious pheasant, and it brought back the lower half of a Barbie doll.
George Saunders
#58. If you want your Storys to end happy, try being niser.
George Saunders
#59. Is this the baby?" I said.
Ma turned on me again.
"What do you think it is?" she said. "A midget that can't talk?
George Saunders
#60. But hereby resolve to write in this book at least twenty minutes a night. (If discouraged, just think of how much will have been recorded for posterity after one mere year!) (September 5) Oops. Missed a day.
George Saunders
#61. Stay alert. The big moral crossroads in your life may not come labeled as such.
George Saunders
#62. Why sad? Don't be sad. If sad, will make everyone sad.
George Saunders
#63. Stood awhile watching, thinking, praying: Lord, give us more. Give us enough. Help us not fall behind peers. Help us not, that is, fall further behind peers. For kids' sake. Do not want them scarred by how far behind we are. That is all I ask.
George Saunders
#64. One of the inspiring things about Susan Sarandon career is that there's a quality of real fearlessness in it - you seem to be in it for the challenge and the experience.
George Saunders
#65. In my work, and in my psyche, there's some very sentimental, traditional, conventional side that's always in argument with a more radical, sarcastic side. Some of my stories are really sentimental, but they're layered over with weird, satirical stuff.
George Saunders
#66. A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.
George Saunders
#67. And they go: Foxes are our favrit Animal. And I go: Thanks. And they go: Why o why were we so stupid as to choose Dogs for our mane Pets? And I go: I reely don't know.
George Saunders
#69. This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eilimate disparity. the traffic stops.
George Saunders
#70. I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion,
George Saunders
#71. Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal.
George Saunders
#72. So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.
George Saunders
#73. 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.
George Saunders
#74. Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
George Saunders
#75. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now we must lose them.
George Saunders
#76. A culture's ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.
George Saunders
#77. Whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.
George Saunders
#78. Sir, the nation is tense," said Cliff gravely. " It is asking itself how it can possibly stand idly by drinking gourmet coffee when an entire race is about to be disassembled. It wants to Enjoy, yes, but it feels it won't be able to fully Enjoy until some other closure is reached.
George Saunders
#79. Don't think of yourself as a surrogate mule, think of yourself as an entrepreneur of the physical.
George Saunders
#80. The thing about girls? Suzanne said. Is we are more content-driven.
George Saunders
#81. Or say we have two rival dictators in a death grudge. Assuming ED289/290 develops nicely in pill form, allow me to slip each dictator a mickey. Soon their tongues are down each other's throats and doves of peace are pooping on their epaulets.
George Saunders
#83. Oh, you break my heart. Why does everything have to be so sad to you? Why do you have so many negative opinions about things you don't know about, like foreign countries and diseases and everything? Why can't you be more like Chief Wayne? He has zero opinions. He's just upbeat.
George Saunders
#84. The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.
George Saunders
#85. So, good news/bad news: good news that I'm progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long.
George Saunders
#86. Or, if you are Penokio, you will feel like: I wud rather not be made of wud. I wud rather be made of skin, so my father Jipeta will stop hitting me with a hamer.
George Saunders
#87. After that came her biggie: a triple murder
her dealer, the dealer's sister, and the dealer's sister's boyfriend.
Reading that made me feel a little funny that we'd fucked and I'd loved her.
George Saunders
#88. I love the feeling of being on the hunt - the feeling that the story is refusing to be solved in some lesser way and is insisting that you see it on its highest terms.
George Saunders
#89. 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
#90. I could actually care less about the poor. We have some living near us, and pee-yew. They are always coming and going to their three or four jobs at all hours of the day and night. Annoying!
George Saunders
#91. Nostalgia is, 'Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?'
George Saunders
#92. On one level, I am a total softie, sort of depressed and afraid of losing the people I love or failing them. To disguise that, there's all this harsh, poop-centric, external swagger, full of nastiness. I'm a cloaking device.
George Saunders
#93. By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.
George Saunders
#94. I've had the thought that a person's 'artistic vision' is really just the cumulative combination of whatever particular stances he has sincerely occupied during his creative life - even if some of those might appear contradictory.
George Saunders
#95. Based on the experience of my life, which I have not exactly hit out of the park, I tend to agree with that thing about, If it's not broke, don't fix it. And would go even further to: Even if it is broke, leave it alone, you'll probably make it worse.
George Saunders
#96. I loved Monty Python for the wordplay
this sense that you didn't have to squash your intelligence to be funny. In fact, you could walk right into your intelligence and nerdiness and self-doubt, and that could be funny.
George Saunders
#97. So many people mentioned this at these rallies. You go to these things and it's kind of like an oldies concert. I mean, it's not hostile.
George Saunders
#98. That's what a book is: a failed attempt that, its failure notwithstanding, is sincere and hard-worked and expunged of as much falseness as he could manage, given his limited abilities, and has thus been imbued with a sort of purity.
George Saunders
#99. I would kind of, you know, go stand next to some unlucky guy and say eventually, Hi, I'm George. You know, I'm with The New Yorker. I'm a liberal. I'm somewhat left of Gandhi. Do you want to talk? And, you know, they always did.
George Saunders
#100. 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
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