George Saunders Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Used, Happens

  George Saunders (2012). “The Brain-Dead Megaphone”, p.80, A&C Black

• The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim.

  George Saunders

  Writing, People, Sloth

  George Saunders (2013). “Tenth of December”, p.21, A&C Black

• Intelligent, heartfelt stories that tell a whole new set of truths about growing up American. Julie Orringer writes with virtuosity and depth about the fears, cruelties, and humiliations of childhood, but then does that rarest, and more difficult, thing: writes equally beautifully about the moments of victory and transcendence.

  George Saunders

  Growing Up, Writing, Intelligent

• I'm always aware of writing around things I can't do, and I've come to think that that's actually what 'style' is - an avoidance of your deficiencies.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Thinking, Style

• When I write I know that I'm going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Needs, Produce

• The best thing that ever happened to me is that nothing happened in writing. I ended up working for engineering companies, and that's where I found my material, in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace. Being broke and tired, you don't come home your best self.

  George Saunders

  Struggle, Writing, Tired

• 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

  Writing, Ideas, Trying

  Source: www.nationalbook.org

• 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

  Writing, Trying, Fiction

• 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.

• [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

• My general approach to writing fiction is that you try to have as few conceptual notions as possible and you just respond to the energy that the story is making rather than having a big over plan. I think if you have a big over plan, the danger is that you might just take your plan and then you bore everybody. I always joke that it's like going on a date with index cards. You know, at 7:30 p.m. I should ask about her mother. You keep all the control to yourself but you are kind of insulting to the other person.

  George Saunders

  Mother, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Thinking, Style

  Source: therumpus.net

• If you start with the idea that you are going to be writing about a night in a graveyard, and that there are only a few living people in that frame, all sorts of interesting and difficult technical problems arise. And then form - new form, or experimental form - might be understood as just trying to tell that story most movingly and efficiently.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Night, Ideas

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

• I think that feels like it to me. I mean 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

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There's a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him - or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn't have anything to do with his ego or his desire to 'be a good writer'.

  George Saunders

  Nice, Writing, Feelings

  "George Saunders and Andy Ward". Interview with Andy Ward, www.slate.com. January 07, 2013.

• A writer writes what interests him and what he can manage, and what he can make live, as Flannery O'Connor said. So my reaction to someone saying "You must!" or "You should!" or even "Hey, why don't you?" is basically to sort of shrug and politely walk off and do whatever I want to do. It's nobody else's business, really, and even if I happened to agree with one of those "musts" or "shoulds" what would I do about it, if my heart wasn't in it?

  George Saunders

  Writing, Heart, Hey

  Source: und.edu

• I've had that situation where I start writing somebody really miserable, and in order to make the story come alive, I have to give them a vote of confidence, make him vulnerable or wounded. But in real life, you often meet people who, in that particular moment, actually shouldn't get a vote of confidence.

  George Saunders

  Real, Writing, Order

  Interview with George Saunders, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 27, 2016.

• There was one sequence of days [making Lincoln in the Bardo] when I had halfway decided to use the historical nuggets, but I wasn't quite sure it would work. I'd be in my room for six or seven hours, cutting up bits of paper with quotes and arranging them on the floor, with this little voice in my head saying, "Hey, this isn't writing!" But at the end of that day, I felt that the resulting section was doing important emotional work

  George Saunders

  Writing, Cutting, Emotional

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I'm always nice when I do drugs. But, you know, I'm nicer on the drug called "writing."

  George Saunders

  Nice, Writing, Drug

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• My theory for nonfiction is that nobody can be free of some kind of conceptions about whatever story they're writing. But if you can find a way to build those into the story, then the story becomes a process of deconstructing and heightening and sometimes changing those notions and that makes dramatic tension. The initial statement of your position, and then letting reality act on you to change it, is pretty good storytelling.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Reality, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

• As Flannery O'Connor says, a person can choose what she writes but she can't choose what she makes live. Some people are really acoustic writers and so for them the secret revision is sound. Other people may revise in terms of the way a paragraph feels. There's a million ways to do it.

  George Saunders

  Writing, People, Secret

  Source: therumpus.net

• I came to writing kind of late. I was an engineer, and the one thing I've learned is that you have to steer a project in the direction of the maximum fun for you. You could say lively energy, or you have to try to be intrigued. Basically, if you were a musician and you were playing joylessly, nobody would want to hear you.

  George Saunders

  Fun, Writing, Trying

  "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. 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

• I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Given, Aspiration

  Interview with Andy Ward, www.slate.com. January 7, 2013.

• I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That's really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects - a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world. And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them - I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Ideas, Challenges

  Source: und.edu

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