George Saunders Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

As the writer of this book [Lincoln in the Bardo], what I loved was the feeling of having so many surprises come at the end that I hadn't really planned or planted.

George Saunders

Book, Feelings, Surprise

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
What was fun for me with this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was to start out with the principle that went, "We're going to fight every day to make this not a novel; make it too short to be a novel." And then with that principle in place, the book sort of starts to say, "Okay, but I really need this. I really need some historical nuggets." And you're like, "All right, but keep it under control."

George Saunders

Fun, Book, Fighting

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
I don't know about transformation. But scientifically you can say: Well, it doesn't seem to hurt anybody. Personally I've been cheered by books at really critical moments. That much I believe.

George Saunders

Hurt, Believe, Book

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
I'm not thinking in any big thematic or conceptual terms - especially in this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] when I was trying to make the voices more active, more energetic.

George Saunders

Book, Thinking, Voice

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
The book says [Lincoln in the Bardo],"I really need this sci-fi device of a ghost inhabiting another person." You say okay kind of begrudgingly. So the structure seemed informed by need and efficiency.

George Saunders

Book, Needs, Kind

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
One of the revelations in that book [Lincoln in the Bardo] for me was this idea about citizenship. Even that word - citizenship - for someone my age, it makes me cringe. But, to me, the political space we're in now argues for a reboot of fairly simple ideas and the examination of the way that Americans have not been living into them.

George Saunders

Book, Simple, Ideas

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
Whole swaths of the book [Lincoln in the Bardo] are made up of verbatim quotes from various historical sources, which I cut up and rearranged to form part of the narrative.

George Saunders

Book, Cutting, Historical

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
I guess what I'm trying to say is that whatever weirdness was going to be in there, I felt, had to be earned. And it had to be required by the emotional needs of the book.

George Saunders

Book, Emotional, Trying

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
While writing this book [Lincoln in the Bardo], [idea of inclusion] occurred to me, you either believe in the Constitution or you don't. If you do, it's intense in what it wants of us.

George Saunders

Believe, Book, Writing

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
[Lincoln in the Bardo] is not a long book. And that meant I could obsess over it and live in it both backwards and forwards and hyper-control everything.

George Saunders

Book, Long, Hyper

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
I knew if I evoked that stuff too easily or gratuitously, as a way of assuaging my fears of not being edgy or whatever, the writing would fall apart. This book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was going to have to have some earnestness in it.

George Saunders

Book, Fall, Writing

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
[In the moment of reading writer and reader] are both briefly their best selves, or at least better selves. A flawed human being writes something and 60 years later a reader picks up the book and something in them rises to meet it.

George Saunders

Book, Reading, Writing

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
The beginning [of Lincoln in the Bardo] is strange, and I did a lot of work calibrating that so that a reader with a certain level of patience would get through it and in the nick of time start to figure out what was going on. In a short book, you can do that.

George Saunders

Book, Levels, Strange

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
There are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven't died yet.

George Saunders

Book, Years, Havens

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
The greatest thing about writing a book is that at first it's all inchoate, but the more you work on it, the more the book teaches you its internal rules.

George Saunders

Book, Writing, Firsts

Source: therumpus.net
And I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it - which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course.

George Saunders

Book, Writing, Mean

"George Saunders and Andy Ward". www.slate.com. January 7, 2013.
I sometimes think that I can't do the bigger thing that [Zadie Smith] do so beautifully, as in Swing Time, with so much world in it and so much rapturous paint thrown around. I don't think it would be possible to write a book on that scale with as much OCD as I have.

George Saunders

Book, Writing, Thinking

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
There are some things fundamentally off about the stance of the book. And maybe that's okay; maybe every book is flawed, and great books, as flawed as they might be, articulate a moral argument that the reader then carries forward. The critique to this model is, of course, to ask: Should a book be ever so perfect that you come out of it with complete moral agreement that can be sustained?

George Saunders

Book, Agreement, Perfect

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.

George Saunders

Book, Creating, Expectations

Interview With Jenny Shank, www.patheos.com. March 6, 2017.
If I'm writing a story and you're reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process.

George Saunders

Book, Reading, Writing

Source: www.guernicamag.com
There were several points where I would kind of turn to the book and say, "Get thee behind me." I don't think real novelists do that. But I make a distinction between prose that's very efficiency-minded (like, the minimum I can get away with), versus loosening the screws and letting the words spill out beautifully and so on.

George Saunders

Real, Book, Thinking

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
One of the ideas that runs through this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] is this Buddhist notion that the mind is incredibly powerful; not the brain but the mind.

George Saunders

Running, Buddhist, Powerful

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
That underscored this idea that when we're reading a book or writing a book, you're in an act of co-creation. The reader and the writer are both trying to dress up and present their best selves and then there's that moment, when suddenly, as a reader, you're not exactly you anymore, and likewise, as a writer, you're not really you.

George Saunders

Book, Reading, Writing

"George Saunders: It's All About Suckage-Avoidance". Interview With Doug Polisin, www.audible.com. March 15, 2017.
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

Book, Thinking, Stories

Source: www.nationalbook.org
It blew my mind, reading Swing Time, that I could take any sentence in the book, and it was one of the most beautiful sentences written in English.

George Saunders

Beautiful, Reading, Book

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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Born: December 2, 1958
Occupation: Writer
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