George Saunders Quotes About Reading

Quotes about: Reading

Later, I went one step further, by putting in some invented "historical" bits [into the Lincoln in the Bardo]. And reading those alongside the actual historical bits was like looking into a sort of a painful mirror, because "my" parts were so show-offy at first. They stood out because they were so flamboyant.

George Saunders

Reading, Mirrors, Historical

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
My mind goes really quickly and I tend to talk really fast, as you've probably heard, I sometimes lose track of my syntax, as I'm talking that fast. The only thing I try to do, well, it's slow down, but also I do something when I'm reading that's similar to when I'm writing a section, which is to really try to imagine you on the other side, in a certain way, as an intelligent, sympathetic presence who's rooting for me to tell you a good story.

George Saunders

Reading, Writing, Intelligent

"George Saunders: It's All About Suckage-Avoidance". Interview With Doug Polisin, www.audible.com. March 15, 2017.
Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we're someone else, disrupting the delusion that we're permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we're saved!) other people are real again, and we're fond of them.

George Saunders

Prayer, Real, Reading
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
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.
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
[Reading Swing Time] made me a feel a little bit like when I used to read David [Foster] Wallace. Like, "I can't play that game. I wish I could, but I can't do it."

George Saunders

Reading, Swings, Games

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
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. And how does that happen? Well, it happens when I know more than you do, and when I know that I know more than you do, and I'm holding it back from you. So that I can then manipulate you at the end. You know, you think about like in a dating situation how terrible that would be, it's the same thing with a book.

George Saunders

Reading, Book, Writing

Source: www.guernicamag.com
On a more technical level, a story takes a lot of words. And to generate words and phrases and images and so on, that will compel the reader to continue reading - that stand a chance of really grabbing a reader - the writer has to work out of a place of, let's say, familiarity and affection. The matrix of the story has to be made out of stuff the writer really knows about and likes. The writer can't be stretching and (purely) inventing all the time. Well, I can't, anyway.

George Saunders

Reading, Work Out, Phrases

Source: und.edu
I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was a young parent, and something opened in me. That's the highest aspiration.

George Saunders

Reading, Eye, Young Parents

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
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

Running, Reading, Writing

The Missouri Review Interview, www.missourireview.com. June 1, 2001.
In the moment of reading, the writer comes up to the surface and the reader comes up to the surface and they kiss, like two fish. That actually does happen.

George Saunders

Reading, Kissing, Two

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
From the perspective of someone with two grown and wonderful kids, that your instincts as parents are correct: a minute spent reading to your kids now will repay itself a million-fold later, not only because they love you for reading to them, but also because, years later, when they’re gone and miles away, those quiet evenings, when you were tucked in with them, everything quiet but the sound of the page-turns, will, seem to you, I promise...... sacred.

George Saunders

Reading, Love You, Kids
[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
I've been reading about and writing about the Civil War period and it is so striking that slavery was never made right - [Abraham] Lincoln was killed, Reconstruction came along, and all of that inequity was frozen in place and carried forward rather smugly. So I think the burden is now upon us white people, to say that this systemic inequality offends us.

George Saunders

War, Reading, Writing

"George Saunders on Trump, Mystery, and Why He Rejects Social Media". Interview with Catherine Woodiwiss, sojo.net. August 30, 2016.
Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.

George Saunders

Reading, Writing, Skills

Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org
Nothing will turn you into a Civil War buff like five years of reading. Some of the letters that people wrote from that time are so deep and so beautifully articulate. And you realize, especially with the stuff that's going on now in America, that it's always been chaos - people were disagreeing at least as much as they are now and 20,000 people would die in a day. It's the scale that's amazing, and also the proximity to our own time.

George Saunders

War, Reading, America

"George Saunders Has Written a Weird and Brilliant Novel". Interview with Tim Murphy, www.motherjones.com. March/April 2017.
This - where we are now - is where a culture gets to, when it has chosen, for many years, banality over intelligence, the literal over the immaterial or complex, materialism over spirituality. This is the result of many years of disrespecting the intellectual project - of a collective acceptance of the idea that thinking and reasoning and reading deeply in difficult text and being respectful of history are somehow "wimpy" or secondary.

George Saunders

Reading, Acceptance, Thinking

Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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Born: December 2, 1958
Occupation: Writer
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