I turned 54 this year and I find myself feeling like I’m in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life – or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations. George Saunders Read Quote
Whatever your supposed politics are – left, right – if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to the occasion and feel the human pain in a way that they might not if it was presented in a more conceptual way. George Saunders Read Quote
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 Read Quote
You know, you can talk about race, you can talk about sex, you can talk about your biopsy. But when you get into class, people kind of clench up. George Saunders Read Quote
For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that’s become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader’s ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page. George Saunders Read Quote
I’ve had the thought that a person’s ‘artistic vision’ is really just the cumulative combination of whatever particular stances he has sincerely occupied during his creative life – even if some of those might appear contradictory. George Saunders Read Quote
The best thing that ever happened to me is that nothing happened in writing. I ended up working for engineering companies, and that’s where I found my material, in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace. Being broke and tired, you don’t come home your best self. George Saunders Read Quote
That for me was the big turning point in my artistic life, when my wife and I had our kids. The world got infused with morality again. Every person in the world should theoretically be loved as much as I love my daughters. George Saunders Read Quote
It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed to know to answer all the questions of the universe. Wouldn’t that be freaky? Whereas the probability is high that there is a vast reality that we have no way to perceive, that’s actually bearing down on us now and influencing everything. George Saunders Read Quote
The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim. George Saunders Read Quote
