George Saunders
George Saunders
George Saundersis an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas and children's books. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian until October 2008...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 December 1958
CityAmarillo, TX
CountryUnited States of America
jobs kindness real
It's not fiction's job to be photographically representative of reality. If I want to make a fictional world where there's no kindness, this doesn't mean I believe there's no kindness in the real world. In fact, what it may mean is that I very much value kindness. Like if you make a painting in which only greens are allowed, it wouldn't mean you don't believe in blue.
interesting feels persons
I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.
technology phones interesting
I've noticed that nowadays I'm doing a lot of stuff on the phone and on the computer, which I usually wouldn't do earlier. And I can feel my brain being rewired: I'm getting anxious, I'm getting more manic. Now, I'm an extreme case because I'm old and I'm overdoing it. But still, it's really interesting that I can actually feel a change in my neurochemistry from this interaction with the technology.
ideas political way
If you want to explore a political idea in the highest possible way, you embody it in the personal, because that's something that no one can deny.
grace cost facts
In fact unrestrained capitalism is quite cruel and the cost is on the individual human, on his or her grace.
wind littles toys
My stories, I can understand them as a little toy that you wind up and you put it on the floor and it just goes under the coach. That I get. Beyond that, I'm a little lost.
daughter jobs stupid
For me, the fiction writer's job is to take the small, stupid process of learning to use an iPhone - and suddenly you're the guy who's asking your daughter, "When I go on Facebook, can it see me?"
struggle opportunity hardship
Success makes opportunities and so many of those "opportunities" are actually exemptions - from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.
sarcastic stories stuff
In my work, and in my psyche, there's some very sentimental, traditional, conventional side that's always in argument with a more radical, sarcastic side. Some of my stories are really sentimental, but they're layered over with weird, satirical stuff.
running reading writing
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.
jobs stuff young-writers
Whatever you love, that will be an influence. It just will. So in effect the young writer's job is: go out and find some stuff to love.
reading work-out phrases
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.
doors long fiction
Fiction is open to whoever comes in the door, as long as you come in energetically.
writing ideas challenges
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.