Top 200 George Saunders Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence.”

— George Saunders

102. “I wander cowboy sidewalks of wood, wearing a too-small hat, filled with remorse for the many lives I failed to lead.”

— George Saunders

103. “At the heart of Vonnegut’s voice is a humility my earnest young self didn’t feel comfortable with: In it, I heard evidence of real humiliation. War really was hell, with hell being the place where whatever you normally counted on or leaned on was taken from you, absolutely. Bill Pilgrim is a skinny virginal dork, and when he gets to war, war leaps on his skinny dorkitude and devastates him unglamorously, and haunts him ever after.”

— George Saunders

104. “Oh, the pathos of it! – haggard, drawn into fixed lines of unutterable sadness, with a look of loneliness, as of a soul whose depth of sorrow and bitterness no human sympathy could ever reach. The impression I carried away was that I had seen, not so much the President of the United States, as the saddest man in the world.”

— George Saunders

105. “Plus he’d been raised on a farm, or near a farm anyways, and anybody raised on a farm knew you had to do what you had to do in terms of sick animals or extra animals – the pup being not sick, just extra.”

— George Saunders

106. “Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now we must lose them.”

— George Saunders

107. “They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d ever –.”

— George Saunders

108. “Why were we made just so, to find so many things that happened every day pretty?”

— George Saunders

109. “What I mean to say is, we had been considerable. Had been loved. Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads in hand; lowered their faces to tabletops, making animal noises. We had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory.”

— George Saunders

110. “No, war will not be stopped. But it is a comfort, in the midst of a war, to read an antiwar book this good, and be reminded that just because something keeps happening, doesn’t mean we get to stop regretting it. Massacres are bad, the death of innocents is bad, hate is bad, and there’s something cleansing about hearing it said so purely.”

— George Saunders

111. “The Russians, when I found them a few years later, worked on me in the same way. They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.”

— George Saunders

112. “From nothingness, there arose great love; now, its source nullified, that love, searching and sick, converts to the most abysmal suffering imaginable.”

— George Saunders

113. “I noticed something: if I put a theme park in a story, my prose improved.”

— George Saunders

114. “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

115. “Trap. Horrible trap. At one’s birth it is sprung. Some last day must arrive. When you will need to get out of this body. Bad enough. Then we bring a baby here. The terms of the trap are compounded. That baby also must depart. All pleasures should be tainted by that knowledge. But hopeful dear us, we forget. Lord, what is this?”

— George Saunders

116. “I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.”

— George Saunders

117. “None of it was real; nothing was real. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear.”

— George Saunders

118. “I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Yuck, yuck, yuck, I’m gonna be evil.””

— George Saunders

119. “Success makes opportunities and so many of those “opportunities” are actually exemptions – from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.”

— George Saunders

120. “The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim.”

— George Saunders

121. “All night I have bad dreams about severed hands. In one I’m eating chili and a hand comes out of my bowl and gives me the thumbs-down. I.”

— George Saunders

122. “Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by ‘The New Yorker.’”

— George Saunders

Featured in: Firsts Quotes, Quotes About Stories

123. “Why will it not work. What magic word made it work. Who is the keeper of that word. What did it profit Him to switch this one off. What a contraption it is. How did it ever run. What spark ran it. Grand little machine. Set up just so. Receiving the spark, it jumped to life.”

— George Saunders

124. “America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.”

— George Saunders

125. “Whatever you love, that will be an influence. It just will. So in effect the young writer’s job is: go out and find some stuff to love.”

— George Saunders

126. “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

127. “And that, by extrapolation, every person in the world has his or her inner orchestra, and the instruments present in their orchestras are, roughly speaking, the same as the ones in ours. And this is why literature works.”

— George Saunders

128. “It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations. But I can look back at the way I thought and felt even as a little kid and there was a lot of wonder there, and openness to the many sides of life.”

— George Saunders

129. “A culture’s ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.”

— George Saunders

130. “The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness.”

— George Saunders

131. “How could we have been otherwise? Or, being that way, have done otherwise? We were that way, at that time, and had been led to that place, not by any innate evil in ourselves, but by the state of our cognition and our experience up until that moment.”

— George Saunders

132. “What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It’s good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It’s good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.”

— George Saunders

133. “The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.”

— George Saunders

134. “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

135. “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

136. “We were perhaps not so unlovable as we had come to believe.”

— George Saunders

137. “So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.”

— George Saunders

138. “I’m not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I’m just trusting that, if I’m working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.”

— George Saunders

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

139. “Lightning strikes the slaughterhouse flagpole and the antelope scatter like minnows as the rain begins to fall, and finally, having lost what was to be lost, my torn and black heart rebels, saying enough already, enough, this is as low as I go.”

— George Saunders

140. “Everything nonsense now. Those mourners came up. Hands extended. Sons intact. Wearing on their faces enforced sadness-masks to hide any sign of their happiness, which – which went on. They could not hide how alive they yet were with it, with their happiness at the potential of their still-living sons. Until lately I was one of them. Strolling whistling through the slaughterhouse, averting my eyes from the carnage, able to laugh and dream and hope because it had not yet happened to me. To us.”

— George Saunders

141. “Even the nuns went racist after the convent was reappraised and it seemed their pension fund was in jeopardy.”

— George Saunders

142. “My heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.”

— George Saunders

143. “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

144. “The secret of boring people,” Chekhov said, “lies in telling them everything.”

— George Saunders

145. “What a beautiful country this must have been once, when you could hop in a coupe and buy a bag of burgers and drive, drive, drive, stopping to swim in a river or sleep in a grove of trees without worrying about intaking mutagens or having the militia arrest you and send you to the Everglades for eternity.”

— George Saunders

146. “To me, the process of writing is just reading what I’ve written and – like running your hand over one of those mod glass stovetops to find where the heat is – looking for where the energy is in the prose, then going in the direction of that. It’s an exercise in being open to whatever is there.”

— George Saunders

147. “I’m comfortable with anything after the fact.”

— George Saunders

148. “I love the feeling of being on the hunt – the feeling that the story is refusing to be solved in some lesser way and is insisting that you see it on its highest terms.”

— George Saunders

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

149. “Got used to being slightly sad!”

— George Saunders

150. “And we rode forward into the night, past the sleeping houses of our countrymen.”

— George Saunders