Top 200 George Saunders Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”

— George Saunders

2. “Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you – and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.”

— George Saunders

3. “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.”

— George Saunders

4. “Goodbye. I am leaving because I am bored.”

— George Saunders

5. “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

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6. “Why was she dancing? No reason. Just alive, I guess.”

— George Saunders

7. “If you at least try to do the things that excite you, it will make you a more expansive and present person – you’ll feel, at the end of your life, that at least you took the shot.”

— George Saunders

8. “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

9. “Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.”

— George Saunders

10. “Stay alert. The big moral crossroads in your life may not come labeled as such.”

— George Saunders

11. “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

12. “Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.”

— George Saunders

13. “Anyway, what I really think good writing does: It enlivens that part of us that actually believes we are in this world, right now, and that being here somehow matters. It reawakens the reader to the fact and the value of her own existence.”

— George Saunders

14. “Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.”

— George Saunders

15. “On one level, I am a total softie, sort of depressed and afraid of losing the people I love or failing them. To disguise that, there’s all this harsh, poop-centric, external swagger, full of nastiness. I’m a cloaking device.”

— George Saunders

16. “What a degraded cosmos. What a case of something starting out nice and going bad.”

— George Saunders

17. “That seems to be the definition of ‘novel’ for me: a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief.”

— George Saunders

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18. “He came out of nothingness, took form, was loved, was always bound to return to nothingness.”

— George Saunders

19. “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

20. “It was just a strong feeling in my hart that it was no gud for Foxes to give up and just be ded on perpose.”

— George Saunders

21. “Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.”

— George Saunders

22. “When I write I know that I’m going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need.”

— George Saunders

23. “If you haven’t read you don’t have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.”

— George Saunders

24. “We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us. Dad began dresssing the pole with more complexity and less discernible logic. He draped some kind of fur over it on Groundhog Day and lugged out a floodlight to ensure a shadow.”

— George Saunders

25. “It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.”

— George Saunders

26. “Twitter is a deliberate abstention. Somehow I hate the idea of there always being, in the back of my mind, this little voice saying: ‘Oh, I should tweet about this.’”

— George Saunders

27. “Success is like a mountain in front of you that keeps growing. If you’re not careful, it will take up your whole life.”

— George Saunders

28. “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 – and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.”

— George Saunders

29. “There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.”

— George Saunders

30. “My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you’ve spent your day.”

— George Saunders

31. “Life is short, very short, and what are we doing here if not trying to become more generous and loving?”

— George Saunders

32. “Err in the direction of kindness.”

— George Saunders

33. “Two passing temporariness developed feelings for one another. Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond. I mistook him for solidity, and now must pay.”

— George Saunders

34. “Nostalgia is, ‘Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?’”

— George Saunders

35. “We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us.”

— George Saunders

36. “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:.”

— George Saunders

37. “What I’m primarily saying,′ he says, ’is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response. Gratitude, and being careful never to make the same mistake twice.”

— George Saunders

38. “On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen.”

— George Saunders

39. “Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.”

— George Saunders

40. “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

41. “We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate – and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.”

— George Saunders

42. “In fact unrestrained capitalism is quite cruel and the cost is on the individual human, on his or her grace.”

— George Saunders

43. “The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I’m not being clear, exactly, but don’t you kind of feel what I’m feeling?”

— George Saunders

44. “No one who has ever done anything worth doing has gone uncriticized.”

— George Saunders

45. “Strange, isn’t it? To have dedicated one’s life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one’s life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one’s labors ultimately forgotten?”

— George Saunders

46. “I was in error when I saw him as fixed and stable and thought I would have him forever. He was never fixed, nor stable, but always just a passing, temporary energy-burst.”

— George Saunders

47. “It’s a big world, and I really like it.”

— George Saunders

48. “The most hopeful thing in the stories, I hope, is wit. I make it up. If I make up a world in which we’re ruled by big talking turds, it doesn’t mean that we are. So you shouldn’t feel depressed...”

— George Saunders

49. “I guess I was sad that love was not real? Or not all that real, anyway? I guess I was sad that love could feel so real and the next minute be gone, and all because of something Abnesti was doing.”

— George Saunders

50. “My stories, I can understand them as a little toy that you wind up and you put it on the floor and it just goes under the coach. That I get. Beyond that, I’m a little lost.”

— George Saunders

Featured in: Quotes About Stories