Quotes from George Saunders

My husband was not handsome and was not generous. He was a bore. Was not rough with me but neither was he tender.

The only way you're gonna be happy is to do the thing that only you can do--or at least try to.

I had a dream and I got up to write it--normally you don't do that, normally it's the penguin orgy and you don't write that.

When will I death? Might I death alone? Probably yes Little scared about that. I must say But am not death yet Not dead yet. Not yet. And not yet. World lays out before me new with each click of step and swish of aspen leaves above for that I say thanks For as long as world is shiny new there is no death and what lovely may I not yet do?

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.

The mind is a machine that is constantly asking: What would I prefer? Close your eyes, refuse to move, and watch what your mind does. What it does is become discontent with that-which-is. A desire arises, you satisfy that desire, and another arises in its place.

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.

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

I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time.

You can say you're a liberal and everybody laughs and it's a good time.

Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

I've seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something dignifies and improves a person.

There might be a different model for a literary community that's quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity.

As a writer I'm essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.

[Reading Swing Time] made me a feel a little bit like when I used to read David [Foster] Wallace. Like, "I can't play that game. I wish I could, but I can't do it."

It seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment.

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.

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.

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.

My habit would have been to veer towards the dark - to prove I was something; edgy, or maybe to prove that I was cognisant of the dark side. Now, with age and confidence, I can say, yeah, that's true, but I am cognisant of the fact that people can do things well. And can be more loving than you expect.

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.

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

What once were two, are one

Whatever you love, that will be an influence. It just will. So in effect the young writer's job is: go out and find some stuff to love.