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" Early on, a story's meaning and rationale seem pretty obvious, but then, as I write it, I realize that I know the meaning/rationale too well, which means that the reader will also know it - and so things have to be ramped up. "

George Saunders

Early

Meaning

Realize

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" The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined. "

" Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived. "

" That for me was the big turning point in my artistic life, when my wife and I had our kids. The world got infused with morality again. Every person in the world should theoretically be loved as much as I love my daughters. "

George Saunders

World

Wife

" If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too. "

" A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did. "

" Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I was a kid, I took 'The Brady Bunch' and 'The Partridge Family' very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus. "

" 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. "

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

George Saunders

Spontaneity

Community

" I was a straight arrow, a control freak. I didn't do drugs or drink, and this was the '70s. I didn't like the loss of control. Which isn't exactly right, because I didn't know what happened when you did drugs. "

" I turned 54 this year and I find myself feeling like I'm in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life - or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations. "

George Saunders

Feeling

Myself

" 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 then having those two run at each other full-speed, like a couple of PeeWee football players, to see what happens. Who stays standing? Whose helmet goes flying off? "

" I've had the thought that a person's 'artistic vision' is really just the cumulative combination of whatever particular stances he has sincerely occupied during his creative life - even if some of those might appear contradictory. "

" If you haven't read you don't have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience. "

" Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up. "

George Saunders

Irony

Honesty

" 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. "

" When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world. "

" To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway. "

George Saunders

Caring

Yourself

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

" If death is in the room, it's pretty interesting. But I would also say that I'm interested in getting myself to believe that it's going to happen to me. I'm interested in it, because if you're not, you're nuts. It's really de facto what we're here to find out about. "

George Saunders

Believe

Interesting

" Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by 'The New Yorker.' "

" 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. "

George Saunders

Hole

You

" I often think about image, and image is something that - but in truth, the real artistic process, as I've understood it, is 95 percent intuitive, like seat-of-the-pants, at-the-moment decisions that you can't even explain, you know? "

" There's a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him - or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn't have anything to do with his ego or his desire to 'be a good writer.' "

" 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. "