531 Quotes by George Saunders

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.

So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:.

Character is that sum total of moments we can’t explain.

I noticed something: if I put a theme park in a story, my prose improved.

What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It’s good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It’s good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he’s made of sugar.

It’s a big world, and I really like it.

That’s what a book is: a failed attempt that, its failure notwithstanding, is sincere and hard-worked and expunged of as much falseness as he could manage, given his limited abilities, and has thus been imbued with a sort of purity.

He was not perfect; he was, remember, a little boy. Could be wild, naughty, overwrought. He was a boy. However – it must be said – he was quite a good boy.