George Saunders Quotes

132 quotes in 2164 categories

• He was a father. That's what a father does.Eases the burdens of those he loves. Saves the ones he loves from painful last images that…
• Err in the direction of kindness.
• Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.
• Goodbye. I am leaving because I am bored.
• What once were two, are one
• I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on…
• More and more these days what I find myself doing in my stories is making a representation of goodness and a representation of evil and…
• The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters…
• The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true…
• The traveller must, of course, always be cautious of the overly broad generalisation. But I am an American, and a paucity of data does not…
• I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion,
• Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort —…
• So here's something I know to be true, although it's a little corny, and I don't quite know what to do with it:
• Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we're central to the universe (that…
• Now, we don't really believe these things - intellectually we know better - but we believe them viscerally, and live by them, and they cause…
• And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU…
• 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…
• Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start…
• Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible.
• So, good news/bad news: good news that I'm progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long.

Browse George Saunders Quotes by Category