Top 100 George Saunders Quotes
#1. Browsing the first editions at my local independent bookstore, I came across 'Pastoralia,' a collection of stories by George Saunders. I'd read one of the stories in it already, and several other Saunders stories in magazines and anthologies, and liked them all.
Trenton Lee Stewart
#2. 'Pastoralia' by George Saunders. Possibly my favorite book. It's one of the weirdest books I've ever read. If Monty Python and Thomas Pynchon had a love child, and it was raised by Frank Zappa on a weird commune, that would be this book.
Libba Bray
#3. Jincy Willett, Sam Lipsyte, Flannery O'Connor, and George Saunders. Oh, and I love Paul Rudnick in The New Yorker.
Pamela Paul
#4. I'm reading George Saunders's story collection, "Tenth of December." He was my mentor at the University of Syracuse. The stories are mind-blowing like everyone says.
Cheryl Strayed
#5. 'Pastoralia' by George Saunders is one of my favorite novels.
Zooey Deschanel
#6. George Saunders is a complete genius.
Bill Hader
#7. Sometimes the truth is so bizarre and mind bending that it must be presented as fiction to be accepted.
George Saunders
The Bookseller
C. Robert Cales
#8. I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.
Emily Perkins
#9. I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.
George Saunders
#10. 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
#11. What a degraded cosmos. What a case of something starting out nice and going bad.
George Saunders
#12. My heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.
George Saunders
#13. 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.
George Saunders
#14. 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
#15. To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.
George Saunders
#16. I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.
George Saunders
#17. I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.
George Saunders
#18. 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
#19. You were just a caretaker. They didn't have to feel what you felt; they just had to be supported in feeling what they felt.
George Saunders
#20. It seems to me that there are certain thoughts and vignettes and attitudes that I have always had the desire to represent.
George Saunders
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. She said America was a spoiled child ignorant of grief.
George Saunders
#25. 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
#27. 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
#28. We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.
George Saunders
#29. Success makes opportunities and so many of those "opportunities" are actually exemptions - from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.
George Saunders
#30. It is soon to be spring
The Christmas toys barely played with
I have a glass soldier whose head can turn
The epaulettes interchangeable
Soon flowers will bloom
Lawrence from the garden shed will give us
each a cup of seeds
I am to wait
I said
George Saunders
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.
George Saunders
#34. Deer Reeder: First may I say, sorry for any werds I spel rong. Because I am a fox! So don't rite or spel perfect.
George Saunders
#35. 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
#36. He was like the bed at a party on which they pile the coats.
George Saunders
#37. I took me to the Banks of the River, and tarried there awhile, as the lowering Sun made one with the Water, giving generously of Itself & its Diverse Colors, in a Splay of Magnificence that preceded a most wonderful Silence.
George Saunders
#38. When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
George Saunders
#39. Even a Canadian baby with a harelip would be beyond our means.
George Saunders
#40. Sucess is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it ... Err in the direction of kindness.
George Saunders
#41. 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
#42. I say it must have been great to grow up when men were men. He says men have always been what the are now, namely incapable of coping with life without the intervention of God the Almighty. Then in the oven behind him my pizza starts smoking and he says case in point.
George Saunders
#43. 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
#44. Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There's a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there's also a cure.
George Saunders
#45. She's sweet but too apocalyptic. You try kissing someone good-night who's just told you for the umpteenth time that the world's experiencing its last disgusting paroxysm before Rapture.
George Saunders
#46. I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now ... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.
George Saunders
#47. 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
#48. I read Rand and thought, "I want to be one of the earth movers, the scientific people who power the world. I don't want to be one of these lisping liberal artsy leeches." So I was working against my actual abilities.
George Saunders
#49. According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.
George Saunders
#50. (So why grieve? The worst of it, for him, is over.) Because I loved him so and am in the habit of loving him and that love must take the form of fussing and worry and doing. Only there is nothing left to do. Free
George Saunders
#51. Early on, a story's meaning and rationale seem pretty obvious, but then, as I write it, I realize that I know the meaning/rationale too well, which means that the reader will also know it - and so things have to be ramped up.
George Saunders
#52. A person supporting [Donald]Trump likes Trump. And I think they would say the same about me.
George Saunders
#53. In spite of the strife the stars were bright as crystal.
George Saunders
#54. I have been married to my wife, Paula, for 25 years. We have wonderful kids. Things are - it's been a really rich life, so I started thinking, is there a way to get valence a little more into the stories, the idea that, yes, things can go wrong, but also they can go right.
George Saunders
#55. You don't want to be that parent - the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks - especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town.
George Saunders
#56. 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
#57. I was back to feeling myself which, believe me, is no picnic.
George Saunders
#58. 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
#59. I'm finding, as I get older, that I'm not much of a believer in redemption. I mean, I believe in redemption in real life - redemption does happen, and it's cool when it does - but I find myself getting leery of my desire for it in stories (especially my own).
George Saunders
#60. If a writer understands his work as something that originates with him but then, with any luck, gets away from him, then what he needs is someone who can grasp the potential of the piece and lead him to that higher ground.
George Saunders
#61. I'm always aware of writing around things I can't do, and I've come to think that that's actually what 'style' is - an avoidance of your deficiencies.
George Saunders
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.
George Saunders
#68. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.
George Saunders
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. There's a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him - or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn't have anything to do with his ego or his desire to 'be a good writer.'
George Saunders
#72. I'm bleeding at the knees and choking from smoke and have no idea who these people are or where I'm going, but at least I'm off the hook in terms of the hand jobs.
George Saunders
#73. You were torturing a cat," she says. "With a freaking prod."
"A prod I built myself in metal shop," he says. "But of course you never mention that.
George Saunders
#74. Twitter is a deliberate abstention. Somehow I hate the idea of there always being, in the back of my mind, this little voice saying: 'Oh, I should tweet about this.'
George Saunders
#75. The work that stirs the greatest passion is also the work that creates around it the greatest silence, the strongest imperative to stand back and admire and let others admire, without interfering.
George Saunders
#77. Succeeding, whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it).
George Saunders
#78. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations. But I can look back at the way I thought and felt even as a little kid and there was a lot of wonder there, and openness to the many sides of life.
George Saunders
#80. 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
#81. 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
#83. 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
#84. I guess you just have to trust your kids, trust that their innate interest in life will win out in the end, don't you think?
George Saunders
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. I'm fascinated with actors, and I've never quite understood the process.
George Saunders
#88. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. [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
#95. So here's something I know to be true, although it's a little corny, and I don't quite know what to do with it:
George Saunders
#96. 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
#97. All over now. He is either in joy or nothingness.
(So why grieve?
The worst of it, for him, is over.)
Because I loved him so and am in the habit of loving him and that love must take the form of fussing and worry and doing.
George Saunders
#98. Do not really like rich people, as they make us poor people feel dopey and inadequate. Not that we are poor. I would say we are middle. We are very, very lucky. I know that. But still, it is not right that rich people make us middle people feel dopey and inadequate.
George Saunders
#99. Success is like a mountain in front of you that keeps growing. If you're not careful, it will take up your whole life.
George Saunders
#100. 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
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