George Saunders

Success is like a mountain in front of you that keeps growing. If you're not careful, it will take up your whole…

— George Saunders

“Wow wow wow is all I can say! Remember how I always buy lunchtime Scratch-Off ticket? Have I said? Maybe did not…

— George Saunders

“None of it was real; nothing was real. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing,…

— George Saunders

“We must see God not as a Him (some linear rewarding fellow) but an IT, a great beast beyond our understanding, who…

— George Saunders

America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts,…

— George Saunders

In my case, when I am trying to be "kind" I often default in a sort of toothless loving-all stance that is,…

— George Saunders

Whatever your supposed politics are - left, right - if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to…

— George Saunders

“A Clinton staffer tells me his theory. Think about Frank Sinatra, he says: born to sing. Think about Willie Mays: born to…

— George Saunders

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

— George Saunders

“You were torturing a cat," she says. "With a freaking prod." "A prod I built myself in metal shop," he says. "But…

— George Saunders

“Rachel got up and did this happy little shuffle, like she was some cheerful farmer chick who'd just stepped outside to find…

— George Saunders

What America is, to me, is a guy doesn't want to buy, you let him not buy, you respect his not buying.…

— George Saunders

What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the…

— George Saunders

We're in the transition between birth and death. But the one that people often know about is the transition between the moment…

— George Saunders

You don't want to be that parent - the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other…

— George Saunders

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually…

— George Saunders

I think that's one of the maybe under-discussed aspects of process - the difference between a good writing day and a bad…

— George Saunders

There are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven't died yet.

— George Saunders

In Catholicism, we would say you're going to be judged, so therefore you should do better now. For me, Buddhism is somewhat…

— George Saunders

If you understand writing as primarily engaging an imaginary reader, well, you've kind of been doing that your whole life. You walk…

— George Saunders

The writer, in order to proceed, is theoretically trying to predict where his complex skein of language and image has left his…

— George Saunders

I like [Barak] Obama. I like him. So how far does rationality help to persuade anybody? You know, I'm not so sure.

— George Saunders

I think something that I can't name about our media has made us move away from that kind of specificity and that…

— George Saunders

One of the ideas that runs through this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] is this Buddhist notion that the mind is incredibly…

— George Saunders

It seemed to me, in some way, especially when you're looking back at distant historical events, the "Truth" with a capital "T"…

— George Saunders