George Saunders Quotes

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.

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

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

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

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

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.

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

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

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?

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.

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

When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn't see it. He can't. He's average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.

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.

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

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

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

The best thing we can bring to any fight is a calm and compassionate mind.

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

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.

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

It really strikes me how much of your energy in America, especially if you're from a working back-ground, is spent just keeping your head above water. It really saps your grace and your strength.

I actually believe that a lot of what people call originality has to do with persistence in the craft.

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

...smile first, then speak.

The idea of inclusion has become kind of a stone that we've passed our hand over so many times that it doesn't mean anything.

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

The Bush administration is a paragon of wisdom.

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.

Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.

Goodbye. I am leaving because I am bored.

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

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

I think kindness is a sort of gateway virtue - having that simple aspiration can get you into deep water very quickly - in a good way.

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

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

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

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

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.

One of the ideas that runs through this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] is this Buddhist notion that the mind is incredibly powerful; not the brain but the mind.

It's so ironic that you often hear these right-wing people talking about the Constitution.

Whatever happens when we die, it would be really weird if it was what we had expected. Even if you were a lifelong Christian believer, it would be kind of weird if there actually were pearly gates.

I think people have come to expect that in artistic representation; that every work of art should be a work of extravagant hope.

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

Err in the direction of kindness.

The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.

Honestly, the choice is: I can be a cheerful person, more awake to correction, more of a force for good ... when I'm writing. Or I can be the opposite of all those things, when I'm not writing.

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.

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.

Monologue is the most honest way to represent human beings.

The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.