George Saunders Quotes

When I'm explaining something to you, if I'm being long-winded, and twisty in a non-productive way, I could make you feel vaguely insulted. And you'd have a right to be. ~ George Saunders

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

If you haven't read you don't have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience. ~ George Saunders

Those stories tended to be located around the places where things went wrong, and people were cruel to one another, and so on. They reflected what was probably the most urgent truth operating in me at that time: oh, shit, things can go wrong, and if they do, people get hurt, and I might be one of them, in spite of the fact that I am, you know, me. ~ George Saunders

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil." ~ George Saunders

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up. ~ George Saunders

I find that the great artists I've met are people who are so playfully invested in their process that, even if it doesn't come out the way they like, they still power through and even take energy from it. ~ George Saunders

Doubt will fester as long as we live.
And when one occasion of doubt has been addressed, another and then another will arise in its place. ~ George Saunders

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

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

In a sense my whole life as a writer is trying to find structural ways, or formal ways, to permit that outflowing so it doesn't just look like crazy output. In other words, if it turns out that you can do a given voice, that's just kind of inclination. But then if you can find a way to put that voice in a story so that the voice serves a purpose, then I would say that's being a writer. ~ George Saunders

I was in error when I saw him as fixed and stable and thought I would have him forever. He was never fixed, nor stable, but always just a passing, temporary energy-burst. ~ George Saunders

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

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. ~ George Saunders

Success makes opportunities and so many of those "opportunities" are actually exemptions - from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle. ~ George Saunders

American society is uncomfortable with the idea that some people's lives are difficult past the point of sanity and that they aren't necessarily to blame. There's no way you can argue that everyone has a difficult life. This is an incredible culture; the majority of people live in amazing comfort, with real dignity, maybe more comfort and dignity than any other culture in the history of the world. We live relatively safe and sane lives, which, if you've ever loved anybody and therefore feared for them, is a wonderful thing. But part of our moral responsibility is to keep in our minds those whose lives are unsafe and insane. In this way, fiction can be like a meditation, a way of saying: Though things are this way for me right now, they could be different later and are different for others this very moment. ~ George Saunders

I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That's really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects - a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world. And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them - I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode. ~ George Saunders

A story is a really weird art object that should contain life but not be enslaved by the banality. ~ George Saunders

Graduate college, win Pam, get job, make babies, move ahead in job, forget former feeling of special destiny ... ~ George Saunders

I don't think much new ever happens. Most of us spend our days the same way people spent their days in the year 1000: walking around smiling, trying to earn enough to eat, while neurotically doing these little self-proofs in our head about how much better we are than these other slobs, while simultaneously, in another part of our brain, secretly feeling woefully inadequate to these smarter, more beautiful people. ~ George Saunders

I felt myself a new species of child. Not a boy (most assuredly) but neither a (mere) girl. That skirt-bound race perpetually moving about serving tea had nothing to do with me.

I had such high hopes, you see.

The boundaries of the world seemed vast. I would visit Rome, Paris, Constantinople. Underground cafés presented in my mind where, crushed against wet walls, a (handsome, generous) friend and I sat discussing - many things. Deep things, new ideas. Strange green lights shone in the streets, the sea lapped nearby against greasy tilted moorings; there was trouble afoot, a revolution, into which my friend and I must - Well, as is often the case, my hopes were…not realized. ~ George Saunders

Some blows fall too heavy upon those too fragile. ~ George Saunders

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish. ~ George Saunders

The decisive butt-kicking he was about to give the Dalmeyer hose would constitute the end of FIRPO in the world, and all, including Ma, would have to bow down before him, saying, Wow wow wow, do we ever stand corrected in terms of you, how could someone FIRPO hatch and execute such a daring manly plan? The crowd was on its feet ~ George Saunders

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

In spite of the strife the stars were bright as crystal. ~ George Saunders

But all that power has culminated in gentleness. It is as if that is the point of power: to allow one to access the higher registers of gentleness. ~ George Saunders

America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn't do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I busted my butt to get where I am, so don't come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs. ~ George Saunders

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 ~ George Saunders

We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us. Dad began dresssing the pole with more complexity and less discernible logic. He draped some kind of fur over it on Groundhog Day and lugged out a floodlight to ensure a shadow. ~ George Saunders

I was a straight arrow, a control freak. I didn't do drugs or drink, and this was the '70s. I didn't like the loss of control. Which isn't exactly right, because I didn't know what happened when you did drugs. ~ George Saunders

Or to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most feelings of warmth?
Those who were kindest to you, I bet.
It's a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I'd say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder. ~ George Saunders

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

What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being. ~ George Saunders

Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances. ~ George Saunders

Good God, but life could be less than easy, not that he was unaware that it could certainly be a lot worse, but to go about in such a state, pulse high, face red, worried sick that someone would notice how nervous one was, was certainly less than ideal, and he felt sure that his body was secreting all kinds of harmful chemicals and that the more he worried about the harmful chemicals the faster they were pouring out of wherever it was they came from. ~ George Saunders

There was a touch of prairie about the fellow.
--hans vollman

Yes.
--roger bevins iii

Like stepping into a summer barn late at night.
--hans vollman

Or a musty plains office, where some bright candle still burns.
--roger bevins iii

Vast. Windswept. New. Sad.
--hans vollman

Spacious. Curious. Doom-minded. Ambitious.
--roger bevins iii

Back slightly out.
--hans vollman

Right boot chafing.
--roger bevins iii ~ George Saunders

I often think about image, and image is something that - but in truth, the real artistic process, as I've understood it, is 95 percent intuitive, like seat-of-the-pants, at-the-moment decisions that you can't even explain, you know? ~ George Saunders

Father," she said late one night. "I can't keep up. Our goats are dying. We're going to have to ask the neighbors for help."
"Have we ever done that before?" he said.
"We've never needed help before," said Capable.
"Well I'm against it," he said. "If we haven't done it before, it stands to reason that this time is the first time we've done it, which means that, relative to what we've done in the past, this is different, which I am very much against, as I always have been, as you well know. I have consistently been very very consistent about this. ~ George Saunders

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

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

I guess I was sad that love was not real? Or not all that real, anyway? I guess I was sad that love could feel so real and the next minute be gone, and all because of something Abnesti was doing. ~ George Saunders

They were both so scared they weren't talking at all, which made me feel the kind of shame you know you're not going to cure by saying sorry, and where the only thing to do is: go out, get more shame. ~ George Saunders

I'm trying to read/edit my story as if I have no existing knowledge of the story, no investment in it, no sense of what Herculean effort went into writing page 23, no pretensions as to why the dull patch on page 4 is important for the fireworks that will happen on page 714. ~ George Saunders

I've seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something
dignifies and improves a person. ~ George Saunders

A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did. ~ George Saunders

Kill every dog, every cat, she said slowly. Kill every mouse, every bird. Kill every fish. Anyone objects, kill them too. ~ George Saunders

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

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

'Pastoralia' by George Saunders is one of my favorite novels. ~ Zooey Deschanel

His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help, or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it. ~ George Saunders

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

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

All will be well and all will be well, etc., etc.,

Todd ~ George Saunders

And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE. If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won't care what happens to YOU, as long as they benefit. That's one reason your parents are so proud and happy today. One of their fondest dreams has come true: you have accomplished something difficult and tangible that has enlarged you as a person and will make your life better, from here on in, forever. ~ George Saunders

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

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

Even the nuns went racist after the convent was reappraised and it seemed their pension fund was in jeopardy. ~ George Saunders

A hip-looking teen watches an elderly woman hobble across the street on a walker.
"Grammy's here!" he shouts.
He puts some MacAttack Mac&Cheese in the microwave and dons headphones and takes out a video game so he won't be bored during the forty seconds it takes his lunch to cook. A truck comes around the corner and hits Grammy, sending her flying over the roof into the backyard, where luckily she lands on a trampoline. Unluckily, she bounces back over the roof, into the front yard, landing on a rosebush. ~ George Saunders

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

[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

Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we're central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we're separate from the universe (there's US and then, out there, all that other junk - dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we're permanent (death is real, o.k., sure - for you, but not for me). ~ George Saunders

What we're doing in writing is not all that different from what we've been doing all our lives, i.e., using our personalities as a way of coping with life. Writing is about charm, about finding and accessing and honing ones' particular charms. To say that "a light goes on" is not quite right - it's more like: a fixture gets installed. Only many years later ... will the light go on. ~ George Saunders

That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality–your soul, if you will–is as bright and shining as any that has ever been....Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly. ~ George Saunders

In a culture that is becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he donates a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library of Congress, that 'Coca-Cola has become an integral part of people's lives by helping to tell these stories,' it is perhaps not surprising that people have trouble teaching and receiving a novel as complex and flawed as Huck Finn, but it is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us. ~ George Saunders

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). ~ George Saunders

Life is short, very short, and what are we doing here if not trying to become more generous and loving? ~ George Saunders

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

So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go. ~ George Saunders

From the perspective of someone with two grown and wonderful kids, that your instincts as parents are correct: a minute spent reading to your kids now will repay itself a million-fold later, not only because they love you for reading to them, but also because, years later, when they're gone and miles away, those quiet evenings, when you were tucked in with them, everything quiet but the sound of the page-turns, will, seem to you, I promise ... sacred. ~ George Saunders

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

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

Down in the city are the nice houses and the so-so houses and the lovers making out in dark yards and the babies crying for their moms, and I wonder if, other than Jesus, has this ever happened before. Maybe it happens all the time. Maybe there's angry dead all over, hiding in rooms, covered with blankets, bossing around their scared, embarrassed relatives. Because how would we know? ~ George Saunders

The terror and the consternation of the Presidential couple may be imagined by anyone who has ever lived a child, and suffered that dread intimation common to all parents, that Fate may not hold that life in as high a regard, and may dispose of it at will.
- In "Selected Civil War Letters of Edwine Willow", edited by Constance Mays ~ George Saunders

Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived. ~ George Saunders

Strange, isn't it? To have dedicated one's life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one's life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one's labors ultimately forgotten? ~ George Saunders

A writer writes what interests him and what he can manage, and what he can make live, as Flannery O'Connor said. So my reaction to someone saying "You must!" or "You should!" or even "Hey, why don't you?" is basically to sort of shrug and politely walk off and do whatever I want to do. It's nobody else's business, really, and even if I happened to agree with one of those "musts" or "shoulds" what would I do about it, if my heart wasn't in it? ~ George Saunders

Fiction is an urgent business. It is the Dying Us telling stories to the Dying Us, trying to crack the nonsense in our heads open with a big hammer pronto, before Death arrives. ~ George Saunders

There's also a way that you have of being precise but also allusive, that works well for me - it's something about the open-hearted way you frame your queries. Instead of feeling daunted or discouraged, I feel excited to give whatever it is a try. This takes a lot of editorial wisdom and confidence - to know just how to get the writer to take that extra chance. ~ George Saunders

Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up. ~ 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

Which maybe that's what love was: liking someone how he was and doing things to help him get even better. ~ George Saunders

Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. ~ George Saunders

Stay alert. The big moral crossroads in your life may not come labeled as such. ~ George Saunders

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

. . . I had my moments. My free, uninterrupted, discretionary moments. Strange, though: it is the memory of those moments that bothers me the most. The thought, specifically, that other men enjoyed whole lifetimes comprised of such moments. (Thomas Havens) ~ George Saunders

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. ~ George Saunders

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

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

Fiction is open to whoever comes in the door, as long as you come in energetically. ~ George Saunders

My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you've spent your day. ~ George Saunders

There is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end ...
Man, it occurs to me, is a joyful, buying-and-selling piece of work. I have been wrong, dead wrong, when I've decried consumerism. Consumerism is what we are. It is, in a sense, a holy impulse. A human being is someone who joyfully goes in pursuit of things, brings them home, then immediately starts planning how to get more. ~ George Saunders

The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imaging the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help.
Which is right?
Neither.
Both.
Maybe all of our politics is simply neurology writ large. Maybe there are a finite number of idling modes. Maybe there are just two broad modes, and out of this fact comes our current division. ~ George Saunders

At Sea Oak there's no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear view of FedEx. Min and Jade are feeding their babies while watching How My Child Died Violently. Min's my sister. Jade's our cousin. How My Child Died Violently is hosted by Matt Merton, a six-foot-five blond who's always giving the parents shoulder rubs and telling them they've been sainted by pain. Today's show features a ten-year-old who killed a five-year-old for refusing to join his gang. The ten-year-old strangled the five-year-old with a jump rope, filled his mouth with baseball cards, then locked himself in the bathroom and wouldn't come out until his parents agreed to take him to FunTimeZone, where he confessed, then dove screaming into a mesh cage full of plastic balls. The audience is shrieking threats at the parents of the killer while the parents of the victim urge restraint and forgiveness to such an extent that finally the audience starts shrieking threats at them too. Then it's a commercial. ~ George Saunders

Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by 'The New Yorker.' ~ George Saunders

At precisely nine in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one ... not a single one of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place ... in addition, zero (0) planes were flown into buildings.
All this was accomplished so surreptitiosly, it attracted little public notice. ~ George Saunders

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

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

It's one thing to be a perfectionist when you're alone, but when you're trying to make it work in an ensemble that's a whole different deal. ~ George Saunders

On a more technical level, a story takes a lot of words. And to generate words and phrases and images and so on, that will compel the reader to continue reading - that stand a chance of really grabbing a reader - the writer has to work out of a place of, let's say, familiarity and affection. The matrix of the story has to be made out of stuff the writer really knows about and likes. The writer can't be stretching and (purely) inventing all the time. Well, I can't, anyway. ~ George Saunders