531 Quotes by George Saunders

I’m bleeding at the knees and choking from smoke and have no idea who these people are or where I’m going, but at least I’m off the hook in terms of the hand jobs.

I think even like Saddam Hussein or Hitler would wake up and say, “I think it’s going to be a good day. I’m gonna do some really important work.” And given their definition of good, they went out and did horrible things.

He was the sort of child people imagine their children will be, before they have children.

That’s what a story must feel like to me. It’s not, “I want to write about a gravedigger.” But you’re walking along and – boop! shovel. “Ok, what does one do with a shovel? Digs a hole. Why? I don’t know yet. Dig the hole! Oh, look a body.”

No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.

At the heart of Vonnegut’s voice is a humility my earnest young self didn’t feel comfortable with: In it, I heard evidence of real humiliation. War really was hell, with hell being the place where whatever you normally counted on or leaned on was taken from you, absolutely. Bill Pilgrim is a skinny virginal dork, and when he gets to war, war leaps on his skinny dorkitude and devastates him unglamorously, and haunts him ever after.

Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by ‘The New Yorker.’

If you at least try to do the things that excite you, it will make you a more expansive and present person – you’ll feel, at the end of your life, that at least you took the shot.

A warm breeze arose, fragrant with all manner of things that give comfort: grass, sun, beer, bread, quilts, cream – this list being different for each of us, each being differently comforted. roger.