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" I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph. "
George Saunders
Soon
Story
Writing
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" Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth. "
George Saunders
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Compassion
" 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. "
George Saunders
Generation
Intelligence
Same
" 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. "
George Saunders
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Fast
You
" 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
" 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. "
George Saunders
You
Truth
People
" We have that illusion that we are 'deciding' what to make a character do, in order to 'convey our message' or something like that. But, at least in my experience, you are often more like a river-rafting guide who's been paid a bonus to purposely steer your clients into the roughest possible water. "
George Saunders
Water
Illusion
Experience
" You know, you can talk about race, you can talk about sex, you can talk about your biopsy. But when you get into class, people kind of clench up. "
George Saunders
Kind
People
Race
" 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. "
George Saunders
Result
Talk
Speed
" Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up. "
George Saunders
Up
Irony
Honesty
" We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish. "
George Saunders
Die
Fail
Try
" So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go. "
George Saunders
Deep
Story
Ideas
" Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so. "
George Saunders
God
Sometimes
Think
" 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. "
George Saunders
Watch
You
Place
" So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity. "
George Saunders
Gothic
I May Not
May
" I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it's a nice way to neutralize that polarization. "
George Saunders
Know
Us
Time
" I was a big and un-ironic fan of Dear Abby when I was a kid in Chicago. I think I sort of internalized her. So I have this inner Abby: cranky, proper, folksy yet scathing, with a beehive hairdo. But that's my issue. "
George Saunders
Big
Fan
Her
" 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
Me
World
Wife
" I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application. "
George Saunders
Short
Story
Think
" 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. "
George Saunders
Best
Tired
Struggle
" I could actually care less about the poor. We have some living near us, and pee-yew. They are always coming and going to their three or four jobs at all hours of the day and night. Annoying! "
George Saunders
Three
Care
Always
" What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other. "
George Saunders
Will
Know
Own
" 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? "
George Saunders
Know
Decisions
Truth
" That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief. "
George Saunders
Way
Story
Seems
" The word 'funny' is a bit like the word 'love' - we don't have enough words to describe the many varieties. "
George Saunders
Love
Like
Funny
" 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. "
George Saunders
Vision
Creative
Life
" 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. "
George Saunders
Work
World
Positive
" 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. "
George Saunders
Right
Loss
Know
" Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived. "
George Saunders
Short
Greatest
Blunt
" When I'm explaining something to you, if I'm being long-winded, and twisty in a non-productive way, I could make you feel vaguely insulted. And you'd have a right to be. "
George Saunders
Right
Feel
Being
" 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. "
George Saunders
Goal
Strange
Moment