Top 200 George Saunders Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Got used to being slightly sad!”

— George Saunders

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

— George Saunders

153. “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

154. “He never appeared ugly to me, for his face, beaming with boundless kindness and benevolence towards mankind, had the stamp of intellectual beauty.”

— George Saunders

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

— George Saunders

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end.”

— George Saunders

160. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes, Quotes About Stories

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

— George Saunders

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

— George Saunders

163. “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

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. “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

167. “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

168. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

169. “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

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

— George Saunders

171. “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

172. “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

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

— George Saunders

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— George Saunders

179. “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

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

— George Saunders

181. “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

182. “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

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

— George Saunders

184. “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

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

— George Saunders

186. “Once again I am only who I am.”

— George Saunders

187. “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

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

— George Saunders

189. “World rips kid’s guts out.”

— George Saunders

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

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. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

195. “One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds. They sounded grate! They sounded like prety music! I listened to those music werds until the sun went down...”

— George Saunders

196. “After dinner the babies get fussy and Min puts a mush of ice cream and Hershey’s syrup in their bottles and we watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could.”

— 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. “I would have done anything to stop the hitting. Anything. So much for human dignity, I think, a few whacks in the ribs and you’re calling a fat guy God and eating soil at his request.”

— George Saunders

199. “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

200. “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