Top 200 George Saunders Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “For me, the fiction writer’s job is to take the small, stupid process of learning to use an iPhone – and suddenly you’re the guy who’s asking your daughter, “When I go on Facebook, can it see me?””

— George Saunders

205. “At times, they’re so Right and I’m so Left, we agree.”

— George Saunders

206. “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

207. “I love the idea that more people would read short fiction. I think it’s such a humanizing form. It softens the boundaries between people.”

— George Saunders

208. “Writing a story I am just trying to find some little interesting thing to start out with: something small, even trivial. Preferably something that doesn’t have a lot of thematic or political baggage – a little crumb that is interesting.”

— George Saunders

209. “If I can be more efficient, I’m actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.”

— George Saunders

210. “I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time.”

— George Saunders

211. “I’ve seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something dignifies and improves a person.”

— George Saunders

212. “I am trying to rekindle my feeling of fondness for the world.”

— George Saunders

213. “I’m not a big fan of my books going on cross-country road trips. They get arrogant and, next thing, start aspiring to become ‘large-print’ books. I say, let them stay home and be regular small-print books.”

— George Saunders

214. “Fiction is open to whoever comes in the door, as long as you come in energetically.”

— George Saunders

215. “These days, it’s easy to feel that we’ve fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love. I mean: we have. But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection.”

— George Saunders

216. “Why was it, she sometimes wondered, that in dreams we can’t do the simplest things?”

— George Saunders

217. “Show your cock,” she says, and dies again.”

— George Saunders

218. “You were a joy, he said. Please know that. Know that you were a joy. To us. Every minute, every season, you were a – you did a good job. A good job of being a pleasure to know.”

— George Saunders

219. “It’s hard to get any beauty at all into a story. If and when we do, it might not be the type of beauty we’ve always dreamed of making. But we have to take whatever beauty we can get, however we can get it.”

— George Saunders

220. “We might imagine a story as a room-sized black box. The writer’s goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another. What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial.”

— George Saunders

221. “If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously – as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.”

— George Saunders

222. “They didn’t have to feel what you felt; they just had to be supported in feeling what they felt.”

— George Saunders

223. “In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference.”

— George Saunders

224. “Was he some kind of worrywart? It worried him.”

— George Saunders

225. “Then held a match to the carpet on the stairs and, once it started burning, raised a finger, like, Quiet, through me runs the power of recent dark experiences.”

— George Saunders

226. “In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world.”

— George Saunders

227. “How can Janet know she’s not being her best self if someone doesn’t tell her, then right away afterwards harshly discipline her?”

— George Saunders

228. “They brought the first guy back and the two old hippies sat side by side, seemingly wary of each other. She felt that each, in his mind, was making the case for being the more intelligent and authentic washed-up former hippie.”

— George Saunders

229. “I just want to say that history, when it arrives, may not look as you expect, based on the reading of history books. Things in there are always so clear. One knows exactly what one would have done.”

— George Saunders

230. “How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?”

— George Saunders

231. “It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too – it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.”

— George Saunders

232. “It was always falling down around you, everything has always been falling down around us. Only we were too alive to notice.”

— George Saunders

233. “Reconsideration is hard; it takes courage. We have to deny ourselves the comfort of always being the same person, one who arrived at an answer some time ago and has never had any reason to doubt it.”

— George Saunders

234. “I teach “The Singers” to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we’ll turn out to be.”

— George Saunders