George Saunders quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by George Saunders

George Saunders Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from George Saunders on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain.

Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.

In fact unrestrained capitalism is quite cruel and the cost is on the individual human, on his or her grace.

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.

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

In the town where I live, I have frequently observed a phenomenon I have come to think of as Samish-Sex Marriage.

Once again I am only who I am.

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.

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

Kindness, it turns out, is hard - it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include ... well, EVERYTHING.

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.

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.

Positive human action is not only possible, but pervasive; human beings can improve and choose light and so on. And this is all happening.

Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

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.

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.

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

A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.

By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.

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

It's a big world, and I really like it.

If you want your Storys to end happy, try being niser.

Though firm, we are never too firm, though we love fun, we never have fun in a silly way that makes us appear ridiculous, unless that is our intent.

Success is like a mountain in front of you that keeps growing. If you're not careful, it will take up your whole life.

Got used to being slightly sad!

Love, love, I know what you are.

I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion,

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

Ted, I swear to God, quothe he.

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

Absurdism was really just realism seen from close to the bottom.

Goodbye. I'm leaving because I'm bored.

I have plenty of friends," she says.
"Name one."
She looks at me.
Which I guess is sort of sweet.

Mr. A calls me into his office and says he's got bad news and bad news, and which do I want first. I say the bad news.

I wander cowboy sidewalks of wood, wearing a too-small hat, filled with remorse for the many lives I failed to lead.

I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations.

Sometimes with all the teasing his days were subtenable.

And finally, having lost what was to be lost, my torn and black heart rebels saying enough already, enough, this is as low as I go

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

So say you are charged with, you and some of your colleagues, lifting a heavy dead whale carcass onto a flatbed.

So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.

If I can be more efficient, I'm actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.

I'm comfortable with anything after the fact.

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

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.

I'm fascinated with actors, and I've never quite understood the process.

Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.

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

Why were we put here, so inclined to love, when end of our story = death? That harsh. That cruel. Do not like.

...smile first, then speak.

So, good news/bad news: good news that I'm progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long.

Our country is big, let us be big.

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

When I write I know that I'm going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need.

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

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

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

Why were we made just so, to find so many things that happened every day pretty?

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

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

I noticed something: if I put a theme park in a story, my prose improved.

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

What once were two, are one

The word 'funny' is a bit like the word 'love' - we don't have enough words to describe the many varieties.

There might be a different model for a literary community that's quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity.

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

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

World rips kid's guts out

Why sad? Don't be sad. If sad, will make everyone sad.

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

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

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.

All night I have bad dreams about severed hands. In one I'm eating chili and a hand comes out of my bowl and gives me the thumbs-down. I

He seems to have a passable knowledge of how to pretend to churn butter.

It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.

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

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.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

I'm very happy - if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I'm thrilled.

Don't think of yourself as a surrogate mule, think of yourself as an entrepreneur of the physical.

She said America was a spoiled child ignorant of grief.

I like [Barak] Obama. I like him. So how far does rationality help to persuade anybody? You know, I'm not so sure.

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

Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.

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?

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

I've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.

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.

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

Nostalgia is, 'Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?'

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.

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