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" 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
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" 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
" 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. "
George Saunders
You
Want
Love
" 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
" 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
" I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society. "
George Saunders
Think
My Life
Life
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain. "
George Saunders
Explain
Character
Sum Total
" 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
" 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
Me
Caring
Yourself
" 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. "
George Saunders
World
Seriously
Family
" 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
" 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 try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish. "
George Saunders
Die
Fail
Try
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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'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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" There might be a different model for a literary community that's quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity. "
George Saunders
Spontaneity
Community
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