I've seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something dignifies and improves a person. — George Saunders Copy Share Image
I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
If you want to explore a political idea in the highest possible way, you embody it in the personal, because that's something… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
Whether you're eighteen or sixty, in a certain way, whatever you know is valid. — George Saunders Copy Share Image
That's the only way that I can figure out how to live, is to say, "Well, I don't know what this adds… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief. — George Saunders Copy Share Image
When you do something that's going to speak to people, it's going to be because you're really allowing all of yourself to… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
I find that the great artists I've met are people who are so playfully invested in their process that, even if it… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed to know to answer all the questions of… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
I'm starting to withdraw from [technology] as much as I can. I don't do much of the social media stuff. Like, if… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
Whole idea is really intriguing to me. If you took snapshots of ourselves throughout the day, the way that our mind is… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
I have been married to my wife, Paula, for 25 years. We have wonderful kids. Things are - it's been a really… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
I knew if I evoked that stuff too easily or gratuitously, as a way of assuaging my fears of not being edgy… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations. But I can look back at the way I thought and felt even… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
What really interests me, on a deeper level, is how our information is coming to us in some kind of messed up… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
There's also a way that you have of being precise but also allusive, that works well for me - it's something about… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
One of the revelations in that book [Lincoln in the Bardo] for me was this idea about citizenship. Even that word -… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
My theory for nonfiction is that nobody can be free of some kind of conceptions about whatever story they're writing. But if… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
The way I understood purgatory - and maybe you've got a different version - but in Chicago in the '70s, the idea… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
What concerns me most is the horrible degradation our notions of truth, civility, and decency have undergone. Also the way that language… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
One of the ways that we cope with anxiety is by over planning and over controlling. If we know where it's going… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
In a sense my whole life as a writer is trying to find structural ways, or formal ways, to permit that outflowing… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
There are things that are shadow sides of the creative energy that are negative and all that kind of stuff. The only… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B)… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
Whatever your supposed politics are - left, right - if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
The main thing a childhood in the Church did for me, I think, was set up the universe as a moral system.… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
Some of our writers are starting to incorporate elements of social media, etc. in the work itself, which is all for the… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
Being in church so often, spending those hours sitting in front of a highly symbolic array of objects, hearing those beautiful texts… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
As Flannery O'Connor says, a person can choose what she writes but she can't choose what she makes live. Some people are… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
I was, not an altar boy, but a reader of the Epistle, and I walked in on a nun and a priest… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
I heard Zen teacher one time talking about abortion, and he was saying the way that abortion makes bad karma is any… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
I don't think much new ever happens. Most of us spend our days the same way people spent their days in the… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
If you have a friend, what's the best way you can experience her beauty? It's to really accept her. She's weird in… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
As a young kid I assumed that everybody was sort of on the same wavelength as I was and then I found… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
In a certain way, we're always toggling back and forth between the absolute and the relative, if that makes sense. — George Saunders Copy Share Image
Monologues, in some ways, are the most scientific descriptions of consciousness and even of gatherings. — George Saunders Copy Share Image
Success is like a mountain in front of you that keeps growing. If you're not careful, it will take up your whole life. — George Saunders Copy Share Image
“Wow wow wow is all I can say! Remember how I always buy lunchtime Scratch-Off ticket? Have I said? Maybe did not say? Well,… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
“None of it was real; nothing was real. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
“We must see God not as a Him (some linear rewarding fellow) but an IT, a great beast beyond our understanding, who wants something… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please,… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
In my case, when I am trying to be "kind" I often default in a sort of toothless loving-all stance that is, actually, not… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
Whatever your supposed politics are - left, right - if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to the occasion… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
“A Clinton staffer tells me his theory. Think about Frank Sinatra, he says: born to sing. Think about Willie Mays: born to play ball.… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish. — George Saunders Copy Share Image
“You were torturing a cat," she says. "With a freaking prod." "A prod I built myself in metal shop," he says. "But of course… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
“Rachel got up and did this happy little shuffle, like she was some cheerful farmer chick who'd just stepped outside to find the hick… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
What America is, to me, is a guy doesn't want to buy, you let him not buy, you respect his not buying. A guy… — George Saunders Copy Share Image