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“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.”
-- George Saunders
#Kindness #Regret #Advice
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“Success makes opportunities and so many of those "opportunities" are actually exemptions - from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.”
-- George Saunders
#Struggle #Opportunity #Hardship
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“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.”
-- George Saunders
#Fear #Mistake #People
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“I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.”
-- George Saunders
#Book #Thinking #Stories
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“There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.”
-- George Saunders
#Tired #Long #Curiosity
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“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.”
-- George Saunders
#Good Day #Thinking #Important
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“Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
-- George Saunders
#Life #Hurt #Confused
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“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."”
-- George Saunders
#Writing #Doe #Looks
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“Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.”
-- George Saunders
#Compassion #Earth #Reason
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“The most hopeful thing in the stories, I hope, is wit. I make it up. If I make up a world in which we're ruled by big talking turds, it doesn't mean that we are. So you shouldn't feel depressed...”
-- George Saunders
#Mean #Talking #Hopeful
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“Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life" -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.”
-- George Saunders
#Art #Real #Black
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“Positive human action is not only possible, but pervasive; human beings can improve and choose light and so on. And this is all happening.”
-- George Saunders
#Light #Action #Humans
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“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:”
-- George Saunders
#Advice #Littles #Corny
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“I'm not a big fan of my books going on cross-country road trips. They get arrogant and, next thing, start aspiring to become 'large-print' books. I say, let them stay home and be regular small-print books.”
-- George Saunders
#Country #Book #Home
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“That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality - your soul, if you will - is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Theresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.”
-- George Saunders
#Mother #Believe #Personality
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“A writer writes what interests him and what he can manage, and what he can make live, as Flannery O'Connor said. So my reaction to someone saying "You must!" or "You should!" or even "Hey, why don't you?" is basically to sort of shrug and politely walk off and do whatever I want to do. It's nobody else's business, really, and even if I happened to agree with one of those "musts" or "shoulds" what would I do about it, if my heart wasn't in it?”
-- George Saunders
#Writing #Heart #Want
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“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.”
-- George Saunders
#Graduation #Kindness #Regret
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“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.”
-- George Saunders
#Writing #Ideas #Challenges
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“My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you've spent your day.”
-- George Saunders
#Heart #Empathy #My Heart
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“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.”
-- George Saunders
#Reading #Work Out #Levels
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“Err in the direction of kindness.”
-- George Saunders
#Kindness #Collaboration
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“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.”
-- George Saunders
#Jobs #Stuff #Influence
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“Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.”
-- George Saunders
#Empathy #Feelings #Guilt
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“Goodbye. I am leaving because I am bored.”
-- George Saunders
#Goodbye #Crazy #Bored
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“It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.”
-- George Saunders
#Cutting #Fiction
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“The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness.”
-- George Saunders
#Couple #Years #Numbers
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“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.”
-- George Saunders
#Running #Reading #Writing
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“So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.”
-- George Saunders
#Childhood #May #Gothic
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“The writer has to make pleasure for the reader - which, I think, is done by taking one's character's seriously and taking one's readers seriously -don't condescend or try to be tricky. Be a friend to your reader - I'd say that's a pretty good first step.”
-- George Saunders
#Character #Thinking #Trying
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“Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There's a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really:selfishness. But there's also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf - seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.”
-- George Saunders
#Medicine #Confusion #Advice
