Even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good place to play with that thing and to begin to really see it. George Saunders More Quotes by George Saunders More Quotes From George Saunders 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 creating expectations book All storytelling is kind of that - there's a bit of text that you put pressure on that spits out some desire that a character has and then you follow that. The other part is that every scene raises an expectation in the reader's mind - that's part of its job is to make you look in and be curious. George Saunders expectations jobs character You go to the marketplace and there are seventeen consciousnesses moving in and out. Sometimes you want the same shirt that I want, and our thought bubbles collide a bit and that makes plot. George Saunders plot want moving Monologues, in some ways, are the most scientific descriptions of consciousness and even of gatherings. George Saunders consciousness gathering way People who've written about Abraham Lincoln's writing emphasize how logical he was. His writing was a syllogistic tool. He would say, if A, then B, and he would reason through it. His late writing especially is so tight and so beautifully reasoned. George Saunders tools writing people We all think we know what happens after death. But maybe it's going to be not only weird but also dorky and comic and inconsistent. George Saunders after-death comic thinking For me, when I'm coming up to a place where I have to make somebody up, it's almost like driving and taking your hands off the wheel. George Saunders driving wheels hands That's the only way that I can figure out how to live, is to say, "Well, I don't know what this adds up to, but I can do the best I can." George Saunders figures add way The story sometimes writes you into a corner. George Saunders stories writing sometimes When you talk about a reader being emotionally moved, a feeling of empathy, I think that comes out of that line-by-line respect for reader. That's actually where it all comes from. George Saunders empathy feelings thinking I think about how I conceptualize the audience. The trick is that they've got to be smarter and more worldly than me. So as I'm revising, I'm keeping that in mind. I cannot condescend, even a little bit. Every single choice that I make is motivated by that. George Saunders choices mind thinking The weird thing was that I went to Trump rallies thinking I was going to run into militant, right wing, racist people and mostly I didn't. That should have been a clue to me. The people I talked to were not, on the surface level, crazy. They were quite nice, quite normal, employed, and actually were wealthier than the press at that time would have led us to believe. At that time, the narrative was that these were all working poor but these were not working poor. That should've been a clue to me that this was a little bigger than I thought. George Saunders crazy nice running I had to go in and do the work of toning [invented "historical" bits] down in order to make them fit [in Lincoln in the Bardo]. It's like if you're an actor and you're always overacting, well, you're a bad actor. But if you're an actor who subdues yourself to the extent that's necessary, then you're really acting. George Saunders acting historical order 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 I'm a big lover of America. I love the people, but also the weird berms, the strange little high schools tucked away in different places, and just the whole geography and the psychological apparatus of Americans. George Saunders america people school I'm turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don't have an infinite number of years left and if there's anything you want to say or represent, it's time to try it. George Saunders guy numbers years I read to make myself feel awake. George Saunders awake feels One of the things I noticed about the Trump supporters was a lot of projected fear. I can't tell you how many times a conversation went like this: "We've got to stop these immigrants, because it's terrible." I'd say, "Okay, what personally have you observed about this?" And there would be basically nothing in that box. And I'd say, "Where'd you get your information?" thinking they were going to say Fox. But they would always say, "Well, I get my information from all kinds of sources." Fox is kind of center-left to a lot of people now. George Saunders information people thinking I'm repledging myself to human-scale values. As a fiction writer, the best data comes through the senses and is then processed through many revisions. We have to learn to be intelligent assessors of the data coming in to us and what it's doing to our mental process. George Saunders data intelligent fiction We've got a real problem with social media that we didn't know we were going to have. It's almost like the demons have gotten out of the box. George Saunders media problem real
