Quotes from George Saunders

Or say we have two rival dictators in a death grudge. Assuming ED289/290 develops nicely in pill form, allow me to slip each dictator a mickey. Soon their tongues are down each other's throats and doves of peace are pooping on their epaulets.

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.

Lightning strikes the slaughterhouse flagpole and the antelope scatter like minnows as the rain begins to fall, 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.

They brought the first guy back and the two old hippies sat side by side, seemingly wary of each other. She felt that each, in his mind, was making the case for being the more intelligent and authentic washed-up former hippie.

After dinner the babies get fussy and Min puts a mush of ice cream and Hershey's syrup in their bottles and we watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could.

Of suddenly remembering what was lost.

I teach "The Singers" to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we'll turn out to be.

From nothingness, there arose great love; now, its source nullified, that love, searching and sick, converts to the most abysmal suffering imaginable.

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

It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it's more, too—it's small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.

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

Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you.

In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference.

Then held a match to the carpet on the stairs and, once it started burning, raised a finger, like, Quiet, through me runs the power of recent dark experiences.

They didn't have to feel what you felt; they just had to be supported in feeling what they felt.

We might imagine a story as a room-sized black box. The writer's goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another. What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial.

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

Was he some kind of worrywart? It worried him.

One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds. They sounded grate! They sounded like prety music! I listened to those music werds until the sun went down...

What a beautiful country this must have been once, when you could hop in a coupe and buy a bag of burgers and drive, drive, drive, stopping to swim in a river or sleep in a grove of trees without worrying about intaking mutagens or having the militia arrest you and send you to the Everglades for eternity.

the nature of that unfairness perhaps being just that they had been born stronger, more clever, more energetic than others), and who, having seized the apple, would eat it so proudly, they seemed to think that not only had they grown it, but had invented the very idea of fruit, too, and the cost of this lie fell on the hearts of the low (Mr.

What is truth, if not an ongoing faith in, and continuing hope for, that which one feels and knows in one's heart to be right, all temporary and ephemeral contraindications notwithstanding?

Q: What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid? A: I love reading anything about gigantic animate blobs of molten iron who secretly long to be concert pianists. It's not a particularly well-populated genre, but in particular I'd mention, "Grog, Who Loved Chopin," as well as the somewhat derivative "Clom, Big Fan of Mozart.