George Saunders Quotes

Even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good place to play with that thing and to begin to really see it.

While I'm doing [writing], I don't feel it.I don't think that's a failing. I think it's just a feature. Like, a feature of oneself.

I believe that, when [meeting of writer and reader] happens and the reader goes out into the world the next day, there's some alteration that might possibly inflect the person positively.

To understand any plea for further consideration of a group you don't know anything about to be some form of, quote, political correctness. These things are bubbling right under us.

We have not been energetic enough - white people haven't - in pursuing racial equity.

Even the written history [of Abraham Lincoln's times] is poorly understood by most people.

I'm a liberal and I'm left of Gandhi and I don't like Trump.

I think if someone could demonstrate to me that fiction did no good, I would still do it, because I think it does good for me.

With nonfiction, I go in trying to be really honest about what my preconceptions are.

While writing this book [Lincoln in the Bardo], [idea of inclusion] occurred to me, you either believe in the Constitution or you don't. If you do, it's intense in what it wants of us.

If you want to be good, all you've got to do is be good.

What evil does first in the world, maybe, is distract us from our pursuit of goodness.

Of course there's objective truth, but when we're looking at people's accounts of it, it seems the real truth lies in the accretion of all these different versions.

I think that feels like it to me. I mean 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.

Our first responsibility in all things is to preserve our goodness of heart - then and only then act.

I try to keep my artistic opinions not so much "to myself" but "on myself."

I think the path for a young writer might be one that says, "I have to accept myself, this is what I am. I can't eradicate my defects. I can work on them."

Whether you're eighteen or sixty, in a certain way, whatever you know is valid.

I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.

The millions or billions of micro decisions that you're going to make, that's what will determine who you are as a writer, not you deciding in advance.

The greatest thing about writing a book is that at first it's all inchoate, but the more you work on it, the more the book teaches you its internal rules.

When you do something that's going to speak to people, it's going to be because you're really allowing all of yourself to the table in an accepting way.

You go to the marketplace and there are seventeen consciousnesses moving in and out. Sometimes you want the same shirt that I want, and our thought bubbles collide a bit and that makes plot.

As one gets older, this question of death, becomes more vexing and urgent.

In fiction, conceptualizing, I've found, produces dull and over-controlled text.

Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.

You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.

I watched a documentary about the immigrant crisis around the world. And it does make me blush at all the times I've stood up on the stage and given your speech about the healing power of fiction.

Equality has always been extant but some of us just didn't know it.

The demographics are changing - and so what? Citizenship is a question of certain agreed-upon values and that is that. Do we believe that? I think at heart we do.

I think this is the other big issue that is not going away: Do we really believe that bit in the Constitution or not? I think we do.

It's on us to investigate ourselves for any lingering sense that we are 'giving' equality. We are not. It is already given. And not by us.

The old and honorable American notion, that a person who works hard should be able to live in freedom and security, with dignity - seems to have taken on a secondary status.

I have a lot of theories about the beneficial effects of fiction, but I'm always trying to get away from them a little bit.

I feel nervous because I revere [Zadie Smith] so much. I don't want to be stupid. If I say something stupid, just interrupt me.

I'm a big fan of the Russians: Isaac Babel is just an exquisite line-to-line stylist.

I'm turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don't have an infinite number of years left and if there's anything you want to say or represent, it's time to try it.

I read to make myself feel awake.

We've got a real problem with social media that we didn't know we were going to have. It's almost like the demons have gotten out of the box.

I actually do believe in life after death.

The bottom line for me is that life is short and art is long.

I know that my only chance at any kind of depth or profundity is to linger within the story, trying to make it distinguish itself.

I've found that my first drafts are not so special. But the more I work on them, the better they get. They are more unique and defensible.

Whatever happens, we can deal with it if we admit that it's happening and so on. So to be comfortable with what is - that is a real superpower.

I'd just say that truth is power and vice versa.

The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.

The main thing a childhood in the Church did for me, I think, was set up the universe as a moral system. Once you've seen it that way, it always seems that way.

In my case, when I am trying to be "kind" I often default in a sort of toothless loving-all stance that is, actually, not kind, because it is not truthful.

As far as which writers embody this form of gentle power - Tobias Wolff, for sure. His persona and his writing both share an easy, capacious confidence that says he has faith in his readers.

Some of our writers are starting to incorporate elements of social media, etc. in the work itself, which is all for the good, I think - finding new ways of being poetic.