Quotes from George Saunders

I was back to feeling myself which, believe me, is no picnic.

I loved Monty Python for the wordplay--this sense that you didn't have to squash your intelligence to be funny. In fact, you could walk right into your intelligence and nerdiness and self-doubt, and that could be funny.

I took me to the Banks of the River, and tarried there awhile, as the lowering Sun made one with the Water, giving generously of Itself & its Diverse Colors, in a Splay of Magnificence that preceded a most wonderful Silence.

In the town where I live, I have frequently observed a phenomenon I have come to think of as Samish-Sex Marriage.

The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.

There was a touch of prairie about the fellow. --hans vollman Yes. --roger bevins iii Like stepping into a summer barn late at night. --hans vollman Or a musty plains office, where some bright candle still burns. --roger bevins iii Vast. Windswept. New. Sad. --hans vollman Spacious. Curious. Doom-minded. Ambitious. --roger bevins iii Back slightly out. --hans vollman Right boot chafing. --roger bevins iii

Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, "no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.

graduate college, win Pam, get job, make babies, move ahead in job, forget former feeling of special destiny...

Don't think of yourself as a surrogate mule, think of yourself as an entrepreneur of the physical.

Though firm, we are never too firm, though we love fun, we never have fun in a silly way that makes us appear ridiculous, unless that is our intent.

It really is true: doing what you please (i.e., what pleases you), with energy, will lead you to everything—to your particular obsessions and the ways in which you'll indulge them, to your particular challenges and the forms in which they'll convert into beauty, to your particular obstructions and your highly individualized obstruction breakers. We can't know what our writing problems will be until we write our way into them, and then we can only write our way out.

Anyway, what I really think good writing does: It enlivens that part of us that actually believes we are in this world, right now, and that being here somehow matters. It reawakens the reader to the fact and the value of her own existence.

The work that stirs the greatest passion is also the work that creates around it the greatest silence, the strongest imperative to stand back and admire and let others admire, without interfering.

Kissing him last night at the pep rally had been like kissing an underpass.

At precisely nine in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one... not a single one of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place... in addition, zero (0) planes were flown into buildings. All this was accomplished so surreptitiosly, it attracted little public notice.

Stood awhile watching, thinking, praying: Lord, give us more. Give us enough. Help us not fall behind peers. Help us not, that is, fall further behind peers. For kids' sake. Do not want them scarred by how far behind we are. That is all I ask.

A bad thing happened to you kids, Dad said. But it could have been worse. So much worse, Mom said. But because of you kids, Dad said, it wasn't. You did so good, Mom said. Did beautiful, Dad said.

From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward. I joined them, flew amount them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would.

We pretend to catch and eat more pretend bugs than could ever actually live in one cave. The number of pretend bugs we pretend to catch and eat would in reality basically fill a cave the size of our cave.

Still, accomplishment is unreliable. Succeeding, whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there's the very real danger that succeeding will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

Fiction is an urgent business. It is the Dying Us telling stories to the Dying Us, trying to crack the nonsense in our heads open with a big hammer pronto, before Death arrives.

It should, as Chekhov said, prepare us for tenderness. And in this regard it starts, I think, with intention.... Our intention is to crack life open for just a second.

Each night passed with a devastating sameness.

It's hard to get any beauty at all into a story. If and when we do, it might not be the type of beauty we've always dreamed of making. But we have to take whatever beauty we can get, however we can get it.