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" Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up. "
George Saunders
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Irony
Honesty
Related Quotes:
" 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
" Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we're someone else, disrupting the delusion that we're permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we're saved!) other people are real again, and we're fond of them. "
George Saunders
Believe
People
Prayer
" 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
Me
Believe
Interesting
" 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
" For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page. "
George Saunders
Intelligent
Art
Game
" Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain. "
George Saunders
Explain
Character
Sum Total
" 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
" Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth. "
George Saunders
Earth
Sympathy
Compassion
" The cool parts - the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as 'the Vegas of the Middle East' or 'the Venice of the Middle East' or 'the Disney World of the Middle East, if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert' - have been built in the last ten years. "
George Saunders
Reputation
World
Cool
" 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
Game
Fast
You
" 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. "
George Saunders
Job
Way
Think
" Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by 'The New Yorker.' "
George Saunders
Story
Accepted
Back
" The scariest thought in the world is that someday I'll wake up and realize I've been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual. "
George Saunders
Love
Fear
People
" 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'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
" 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
Up
" 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
" 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.' "
George Saunders
Life
Nice
Good
" 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
" 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
" When I write I know that I'm going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need. "
George Saunders
Going
Write
Percent
" 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 his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar. "
George Saunders
Birthday
Character
Drama
" 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
" 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
" I'm finding, as I get older, that I'm not much of a believer in redemption. I mean, I believe in redemption in real life - redemption does happen, and it's cool when it does - but I find myself getting leery of my desire for it in stories (especially my own). "
George Saunders
Finding
Cool
Life
" 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
Me
Myself
" 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
" So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity. "
George Saunders
Gothic
I May Not
May
" It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed to know to answer all the questions of the universe. Wouldn't that be freaky? Whereas the probability is high that there is a vast reality that we have no way to perceive, that's actually bearing down on us now and influencing everything. "
George Saunders
Questions
Know
Down
" When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn't see it. He can't. He's average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo. "
George Saunders
See
Culture
Average