3 December 2020 George Saunders Whatever your supposed politics are – left, right – if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to the occasion and feel the human pain in a way that they might not if it was presented in a more conceptual way.
3 December 2020 George Saunders When I was a kid, I took ‘The Brady Bunch’ and ‘The Partridge Family’ very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.
3 December 2020 George Saunders If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences – where things turn out better than you thought they would – ought to be in there somewhere, too.
3 December 2020 George Saunders I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I’ve done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.
3 December 2020 George Saunders If you haven’t read you don’t have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.
3 December 2020 George Saunders 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.
3 December 2020 George Saunders It’s funny with fiction – once you cut something, it hasn’t happened anymore.
3 December 2020 George Saunders The word ‘funny’ is a bit like the word ‘love’ – we don’t have enough words to describe the many varieties.
3 December 2020 George Saunders A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.
3 December 2020 George Saunders We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate – and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.
3 December 2020 George Saunders The scariest thought in the world is that someday I’ll wake up and realize I’ve been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual.
