Top 100 Saunders Quotes

#1. I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.

George Saunders

#2. 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

#3. The Sabbath-day is the savings-bank of humanity.

Arthur Frederick Saunders

#4. What a degraded cosmos. What a case of something starting out nice and going bad.

George Saunders

#5. My heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.

George Saunders

#6. So much of people's fortune, good or bad, depends upon how they choose to fall in love.

Kate Saunders

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. It's interesting to see how some of the womenswear designers that we have long worked with at Net-A-Porter are developing menswear collections - Christopher Kane, Jonathan Saunders and Richard Nicoll.

Natalie Massenet

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. But as an amateur, the highest level you can box at is the Olympics. I did that at 18 and felt it was time to move on to other challenges as a professional.

Billy Joe Saunders

#16. It seems to me that there are certain thoughts and vignettes and attitudes that I have always had the desire to represent.

George Saunders

#17. Brain cells create ideas. Stress kills brain cells. Stress is not a good idea

Arthur Frederick Saunders

#18. Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them.

Peter Saunders

#19. I grew up with a mother who, every time she saw something, would say, I'm going to look that up. And I've become that person - I've become the reference-book person.

Jennifer Saunders

#20. I can remember the first face-lift show that came on. I rang up everyone - are you watching? I'm watching.

Jennifer 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. The right to die can easily become the duty to die.

Peter Saunders

#26. 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. Love, love, I know what you are.

George Saunders

#28. 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

#29. flourished between three generations

Jemma J. Saunders

#30. We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

George Saunders

#31. Time Progression: Wasting Spending Managing Investing

Elizabeth Grace Saunders

#32. Success makes opportunities and so many of those "opportunities" are actually exemptions - from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.

George Saunders

#33. Well, I'm lucky because, you see, I'll probably bounce back from this role.

Jennifer Saunders

#34. Because no one ever wanted to admit to being in love. Love was too confusing and traitorous to the self. Too dangerous.

Kendra L. Saunders

#35. 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

#36. How could something that started out with such good intentions end so badly?

Chris Saunders

#37. How people die remains in the memory of those who live on

Cicely Saunders

#38. 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

#39. The pathos of man is that he hungers for personal fulfillment and for a sense of community with others.

Jay Saunders Redding

#40. You dial another college friend, Dr. Saunders, and she picks up almost immediately, 'Hi! Got a shitstorm here, what's up?

A.J. Lauer

#41. But I think our humour is exactly the same today. Only, we've made rules now. We've said we are not going to do prosthetic make-up scenes, because when they take it off half your face comes off.

Jennifer Saunders

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. Its 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, its dark, and we're wearing sunglasses.....hit it...

John A. Saunders

#45. To try to be better is to be better.

Charlotte Saunders Cushman

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. He was like the bed at a party on which they pile the coats.

George Saunders

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. Who do I like? I am a big fan of French and Saunders - not that that they are particularly stand-up I have to say, but I think they have been great for women and they are of themselves just incredibly funny whether they are male or female.

Jo Brand

#52. Reality always wins.

Elizabeth Grace Saunders

#53. Expeditions are escapism. The stuff that we're normally concerned about just doesn't matter out there. Tax returns, gas bill, none of it. Life becomes very simple, it's about moving in a certain direction - north if you're going north - staying warm and not getting eaten. That's it.

Ben Saunders

#54. Time is the ultimate democracy. Rich and poor, young and old, male and female: all have 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week.

Elizabeth Grace Saunders

#55. I came to the Kardashians a bit late, and I'm still just gob-smacked. Who are these people?

Jennifer Saunders

#56. bread slathered in it on the griddle. Belinda poured some coffee, yawning as she dumped spoonfuls

Amy Saunders

#57. Even a Canadian baby with a harelip would be beyond our means.

George Saunders

#58. Good general theory does not search for the maximum generality, but for the right generality.

Saunders Mac Lane

#59. Sucess is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it ... Err in the direction of kindness.

George Saunders

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. Boxing has kept me off the streets, stops me smoking and drinking and gives me something to do.

Billy Joe Saunders

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. Time Progression: Wasting >>Spending >> Managing >> Investing

Elizabeth Grace Saunders

#66. 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

#67. The writer's ultimate purpose is to use his gifts to develop man's awareness of himself so that he, man, can become a better instrument for living together with other men. This sense of identity is the root by which all honest creative effort is fed.

Jay Saunders Redding

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 'The Rocky Horror Show' was actually my first musical love.

Jennifer Saunders

#72. 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

#73. No, sometimes we just have to take liberties because the idea was so good. I wish we'd just gone with the idea that Patsy had been a man. It would have been fantastic.

Jennifer Saunders

#74. I've diced with death the most cycling around London. Black cabs are far more dangerous than polar bears.

Ben Saunders

#75. Kind words are benedictions. The are not only instruments of power, but of benevolence and courtesy; blessings both to the speaker and hearer of them.

Arthur Frederick Saunders

#76. Time is not a means to keep or prove your worth in the world, but a means to experience the richness of all that is.

Elizabeth Grace Saunders

#77. (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

#78. The reason they keep it so tight is that no one liked them, so that without each other, actually, they couldn't exist. They support each other. They support their flaws and everything else.

Jennifer Saunders

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. The standard "foundation" for mathematics starts with sets and their elements. It is possible to start differently, by axiomatising not elements of sets but functions between sets. This can be done by using the language of categories and universal constructions.

Saunders Mac Lane

#82. A person supporting [Donald]Trump likes Trump. And I think they would say the same about me.

George Saunders

#83. I hate the world sometimes," Anthea said. "The unfairness of it. I won't force you to see me if you don't want to - but nobody can stop me loving you, and I'll wait for you all my life if I have to.

Kate Saunders

#84. In the late 1940s, Saunders had tended to a Jewish refugee from Warsaw dying of cancer in London. The man had left Saunders his life savings - £500 - with a desire to be "a window in [her] home."577

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#85. In spite of the strife the stars were bright as crystal.

George Saunders

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. I was back to feeling myself which, believe me, is no picnic.

George Saunders

#90. 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

#91. I think it is a bit harder for women starting in comedy.

Jennifer Saunders

#92. 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

#93. They have become part of us in that if we get dressed up as them, we don't actually have to have a script. You can just become them. You just become nervy.

Jennifer Saunders

#94. 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

#95. I'm fighting for the Commonwealth title on Saturday and I believe I'll be ready for a world title shot in the next 18 months.

Billy Joe Saunders

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. We spend our lives asking the question, 'What do people want me to do? Who do they want me to be?' But this is a betrayal of our inner truth. We should be investing our lives in the pursuit of discovering who we are and what we were created to do.

Elizabeth Grace Saunders

#99. When I was a child, a lot of my time was spent in Scotland because my mother's Scottish, and we used to go up to Ayrshire and visit relations in a place called Dalry.

Jennifer Saunders

#100. 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

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