I was trained in seismic prospecting. We’d drill a deep hole and put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill. George Saunders Read Quote
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 Read Quote
You don’t want to be that parent – the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks – especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town. George Saunders Read Quote
If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences – where things turn out better than you thought they would – ought to be in there somewhere, too. George Saunders Read Quote
Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they’re being written. Or at least they do for me. They’re the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision. George Saunders Read Quote
Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so. George Saunders Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. George Saunders Read Quote
When I write I know that I’m going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need. George Saunders Read Quote
The word ‘funny’ is a bit like the word ‘love’ – we don’t have enough words to describe the many varieties. George Saunders Read Quote
