200 George Saunders Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I’m comfortable with anything after the fact.”

— George Saunders

152. “She said America was a spoiled child ignorant of grief.”

— George Saunders

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

— George Saunders

154. “As a writer I’m essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.”

— George Saunders

155. “I read Rand and thought, “I want to be one of the earth movers, the scientific people who power the world. I don’t want to be one of these lisping liberal artsy leeches.” So I was working against my actual abilities.”

— George Saunders

156. “Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.”

— George Saunders

157. “I am always considering the reader. Although this is admittedly kind of odd: Which reader? On what day? In what mood? For me, that “reader” is actually just me, if I had never read the story before.”

— George Saunders

158. “This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eilimate disparity. the traffic stops.”

— George Saunders

159. “If you want to explore a political idea in the highest possible way, you embody it in the personal, because that’s something that no one can deny.”

— George Saunders

160. “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

161. “He didn’t like the thought of them knowing he’d been scared. Didn’t like the thought of them knowing what a fool he’d been. Oh, to hell with that! Tell everyone! He’d done it! He’d been driven to do it and he’d done it and that was it. That was him. That was part of who he was.”

— George Saunders

162. “That’s what a book is: a failed attempt that, its failure notwithstanding, is sincere and hard-worked and expunged of as much falseness as he could manage, given his limited abilities, and has thus been imbued with a sort of purity.”

— George Saunders

163. “Someday, I’m sure, dreams will come true. But when? Why not now? Why not?”

— George Saunders

164. “I have lunch, flirt with some local grandmothers, undercut my flirting by crotching myself on the corner of a table as I leave. – “The Great Divider.”

— George Saunders

165. “There might be a different model for a literary community that’s quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity.”

— George Saunders

166. “They were both so scared they weren’t talking at all, which made me feel the kind of shame you know you’re not going to cure by saying sorry, and where the only thing to do is: go out, get more shame.”

— George Saunders

167. “I don’t think much new ever happens. Most of us spend our days the same way people spent their days in the year 1000: walking around smiling, trying to earn enough to eat, while neurotically doing these little self-proofs in our head about how much better we are than these other slobs, while simultaneously, in another part of our brain, secretly feeling woefully inadequate to these smarter, more beautiful people.”

— George Saunders

168. “He seems to have a passable knowledge of how to pretend to churn butter.”

— George Saunders

169. “I can look back and see that I’ve spent much of my life in a cloud of things that have tended to push “being kind” to the periphery. Things like: Anxiety. Fear. Insecurity. Ambition. The mistaken belief that enough accomplishment will rid me of all that anxiety, fear, insecurity, and ambition. The belief that if I can only accrue enough – enough accomplishment, money, fame – my neuroses will disappear.”

— George Saunders

170. “Saunders writes like something of a saint. He seems in touch with some better being. He teaches us not only how to write but how to live. He sets the bar and also the example. He hopes we might see the possibility of our better selves and act on it. He seems sent – what other way to put it? – to teach us mercy and grace.”

— George Saunders

171. “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

172. “It seems to me that there are certain thoughts and vignettes and attitudes that I have always had the desire to represent.”

— George Saunders

173. “That’s what a story must feel like to me. It’s not, “I want to write about a gravedigger.” But you’re walking along and – boop! shovel. “Ok, what does one do with a shovel? Digs a hole. Why? I don’t know yet. Dig the hole! Oh, look a body.””

— George Saunders

174. “Soon it becomes clear that we are not, after all, in control, not a high-functioning sailor standing stably on a nice calm deck, a deck that we have created through our virtue. The ship is pitching, and the deck is covered in ice, and we’re wearing special headphones that distort what our crewmates are shouting and special mouthpieces that distort what we’re shouting back in return.”

— George Saunders

175. “A Clinton staffer tells me his theory. Think about Frank Sinatra, he says: born to sing. Think about Willie Mays: born to play ball. These guys got their power from living lives perfectly suited to their natures. Same with Clinton: his life is perfectly suited to his nature.”

— George Saunders

176. “Had been grandmothers, tolerant and frank, recipients of certain dark secrets, who, by the quality of their unjudging listening, granted tacit forgiveness, and thus let in the sun.”

— George Saunders

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

— George Saunders

178. “So say you are charged with, you and some of your colleagues, lifting a heavy dead whale carcass onto a flatbed.”

— George Saunders

179. “It’s funny with fiction – once you cut something, it hasn’t happened anymore.”

— George Saunders

180. “The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull – to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.”

— George Saunders

181. “All men labor under some impingements on their freedom; none is absolutely at liberty.”

— George Saunders

182. “The writer, in order to proceed, is theoretically trying to predict where his complex skein of language and image has left his reader, who he has likely never met and who is actually thousands of readers.”

— George Saunders

183. “World rips kid’s guts out.”

— George Saunders

184. “Each night passed with a devastating sameness.”

— George Saunders

185. “My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period and what you’re really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces – trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work.”

— George Saunders

186. “I think even like Saddam Hussein or Hitler would wake up and say, “I think it’s going to be a good day. I’m gonna do some really important work.” And given their definition of good, they went out and did horrible things.”

— George Saunders

187. “Now all these happy sites and sounds seem like triks. Now it seems like the gud times are mere lee smoke that, upon blowing away, here is the reel life, which is: rok hats, kikking, stomping.”

— George Saunders

188. “But hopeful dear us, we forget.”

— George Saunders

189. “Once again I am only who I am.”

— George Saunders

190. “I’m very happy – if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I’m thrilled.”

— George Saunders

191. “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

192. “Every human position has a problem with it. Believed in too much, it slides into error. It’s not that no position is correct; it’s that no position is correct for long. We’re perpetually slipping out of absolute virtue and failing to notice, blinded by our desire to settle in – to finally stop fretting about things and relax forever and just be correct; to find an agenda and stick with it.”

— George Saunders

193. “I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.”

— George Saunders

194. “Whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it – every word has a big question mark over it.”

— George Saunders

195. “If a writer understands his work as something that originates with him but then, with any luck, gets away from him, then what he needs is someone who can grasp the potential of the piece and lead him to that higher ground.”

— George Saunders

196. “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

197. “It really strikes me how much of your energy in America, especially if you’re from a working back-ground, is spent just keeping your head above water. It really saps your grace and your strength.”

— George Saunders

198. “Every writer knows that when you’re imitating somebody – you know, you’re sounding like Faulkner – you’re doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn’t Faulkneresque.”

— George Saunders

199. “By Fate, by Destiny, said the Vermonter. By the fact that time runs in only one direction, and we are borne along by it, influenced precisely as we are, to do just the things that we do, the bass lisper said.”

— George Saunders

200. “I think that’s one of the maybe under-discussed aspects of process – the difference between a good writing day and a bad one is the quality of the split-second decisions you made.”

— George Saunders