110+ George Saunders Quotes On Writing, Kindness And Humorous

George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, and novels. He is known for his satirical and darkly humorous writing style. He is the author of several books, including the short story collection Tenth of December and the novel Lincoln in the Bardo. Following is our collection on famous quotes by George Saunders on writing, kindness, humorous.

Top 10 George Saunders Quotes

1. 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.
2. What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
3. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.
4. Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.
5. 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.
6. It's a big world, and I really like it.
7. Kindness, it turns out, is hard - it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, EVERYTHING.
8. The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?
9. I'm always aware of writing around things I can't do, and I've come to think that that's actually what 'style' is - an avoidance of your deficiencies.
10. When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn't see it. He can't. He's average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.

George Saunders Short Quotes

• We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.
• Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.
• ...smile first, then speak.
• Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
• It's so ironic that you often hear these right-wing people talking about the Constitution.
• So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.
• The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.
• She said America was a spoiled child ignorant of grief.
• I'm a control freak. I'm defensive. And I'm an egomaniac. That's true about me.
• I try to keep my artistic opinions not so much "to myself" but "on myself."

George Saunders Quotes About Writing

I'm trying to read/edit my story as if I have no existing knowledge of the story, no investment in it, no sense of what Herculean effort went into writing page 23, no pretensions as to why the dull patch on page 4 is important for the fireworks that will happen on page 714. — George Saunders

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph. — George Saunders

The best thing that ever happened to me is that nothing happened in writing. I ended up working for engineering companies, and that's where I found my material, in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace. Being broke and tired, you don't come home your best self. — George Saunders

There's a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him - or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn't have anything to do with his ego or his desire to 'be a good writer'. — George Saunders

I would say one thing writing this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] did for me was underscore the fact that this issue [all men are created equal] has never been properly addressed and it hasn't gone away. — George Saunders

My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period and what you're really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces - trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work. — George Saunders

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

If I'm writing a story and you're reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process. — George Saunders

Writing a story I am just trying to find some little interesting thing to start out with: something small, even trivial. Preferably something that doesn't have a lot of thematic or political baggage - a little crumb that is interesting. — George Saunders

Honestly, the choice is: I can be a cheerful person, more awake to correction, more of a force for good ... when I'm writing. Or I can be the opposite of all those things, when I'm not writing. — George Saunders

George Saunders Quotes About Kindness

The universal human laws - need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture. — George Saunders

The idea of inclusion has become kind of a stone that we've passed our hand over so many times that it doesn't mean anything. — George Saunders

I think kindness is a sort of gateway virtue - having that simple aspiration can get you into deep water very quickly - in a good way. — George Saunders

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another. — George Saunders

Whatever happens when we die, it would be really weird if it was what we had expected. Even if you were a lifelong Christian believer, it would be kind of weird if there actually were pearly gates. — George Saunders

When we talk about adversity, this is the moment when character really gets tested. When things aren't going the way you want and you can't see anyway that they're going to go the way you want. That's kind of when those old virtues really become valuable and vulnerable also. — George Saunders

When you're out there in America, meeting with regular people, it's a pretty mellow, relaxed, kind-hearted country. The direction from the top, from the President, is following mean-spirited tendencies: fear and undue caution and distrust of the other, so it's very depressing. — George Saunders

There are things that are shadow sides of the creative energy that are negative and all that kind of stuff. The only thing that I say to myself is, in the spirit of that quote from the Gnostic Gospels: Writing is a way to let all that stuff out into the sun. — George Saunders

All storytelling is kind of that - there's a bit of text that you put pressure on that spits out some desire that a character has and then you follow that. The other part is that every scene raises an expectation in the reader's mind - that's part of its job is to make you look in and be curious. — George Saunders

I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings. — George Saunders

George Saunders Quotes About Total

On one level, I am a total softie, sort of depressed and afraid of losing the people I love or failing them. To disguise that, there's all this harsh, poop-centric, external swagger, full of nastiness. I'm a cloaking device. — George Saunders

You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied. — George Saunders

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain. — George Saunders

George Saunders Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

We have that illusion that we are 'deciding' what to make a character do, in order to 'convey our message' or something like that. But, at least in my experience, you are often more like a river-rafting guide who's been paid a bonus to purposely steer your clients into the roughest possible water. — George Saunders

Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we're someone else, disrupting the delusion that we're permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we're saved!) other people are real again, and we're fond of them. — George Saunders

I was a big and un-ironic fan of Dear Abby when I was a kid in Chicago. I think I sort of internalized her. So I have this inner Abby: cranky, proper, folksy yet scathing, with a beehive hairdo. But that's my issue. — George Saunders

I attended Catholic school. We received a great education from the nuns. ... Also, guilt. Guilt and a feeling of never being satisfied with what you've done. And a sense that you are inadequate and a big phony. All useful for a writer. I'm always being edited by my inner nun. — George Saunders

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

In Catholicism, we would say you're going to be judged, so therefore you should do better now. For me, Buddhism is somewhat more workable because instead of saying I have to do good, it says I have to notice what I'm actually doing. — George Saunders

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

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

So, good news/bad news: good news that I'm progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long. — George Saunders

It really strikes me how much of your energy in America, especially if you're from a working back-ground, is spent just keeping your head above water. It really saps your grace and your strength. — George Saunders

Still, accomplishment is unreliable. "Succeeding," whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there's the very real danger that "succeeding" will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended. — George Saunders

I think it is time for a new pride in the intellectual life, and a new impatience with people who take pride in ignorance, or somehow use "elite" to mean "person who has taken the time to know" and then are eager to dismiss, say, striving, or the notion that improving one's self out of difficult conditions is a noble thing. — George Saunders

When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world. — George Saunders

If I go to the coffee shop and have a nice interaction with the barista, I don't know what that does for world peace, but we have to assume that in the great basket of goodness maybe that's one little micron or one little neutron that you've put in there. — George Saunders

Success makes opportunities and so many of those "opportunities" are actually exemptions - from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle. — George Saunders

I was, not an altar boy, but a reader of the Epistle, and I walked in on a nun and a priest furiously French kissing when I was in seventh grade. I walked in, saw it, and went, "No way," backed out, composed myself, and went back in, and it was still going on. And the experience of seeing that was actually very deep. — George Saunders

More and more these days what I find myself doing in my stories is making a representation of goodness and a representation of evil and then having those two run at each other full-speed, like a couple of PeeWee football players, to see what happens. Who stays standing? Whose helmet goes flying off? — George Saunders

Intelligent, heartfelt stories that tell a whole new set of truths about growing up American. Julie Orringer writes with virtuosity and depth about the fears, cruelties, and humiliations of childhood, but then does that rarest, and more difficult, thing: writes equally beautifully about the moments of victory and transcendence. — George Saunders

I think people have come to expect that in artistic representation; that every work of art should be a work of extravagant hope. — George Saunders

In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe. — George Saunders

My understanding of kindness is that we are hoping to be truly beneficial in every situation, and that this desire means a whole suite of things: being nicer, sure, but also being more aware, more present, more articulate, more fearless, less habituated, etc., etc. And sometimes even being firm, or having an edge, or even being angry. — George Saunders

My habit would have been to veer towards the dark - to prove I was something; edgy, or maybe to prove that I was cognisant of the dark side. Now, with age and confidence, I can say, yeah, that's true, but I am cognisant of the fact that people can do things well. And can be more loving than you expect. — George Saunders

The thing I've discovered that is a help is that there isn't a simple virtue or a simple vice. They're always connected. If you have Tendency A, that you loathe, you can almost be sure that Tendency B, which you love, is somehow connected to it. — George Saunders

The cool parts - the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as 'the Vegas of the Middle East' or 'the Venice of the Middle East' or 'the Disney World of the Middle East, if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert' - have been built in the last ten years. — George Saunders

When I wrote that [Donald] Trump piece, I had this uncomfortable experience of sensing a lot of things that were nascent, that I couldn't quite articulate. And one of them was this move toward anti-intellectualism. An anti-love move, even. — George Saunders

If a writer understands his work as something that originates with him but then, with any luck, gets away from him, then what he needs is someone who can grasp the potential of the piece and lead him to that higher ground. — George Saunders

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil." — George Saunders

To me that really would be the essence of kindness, to have one's awareness so developed and refined that you could tell just what was needed, and not do any more or any less, and maybe not even be aware of what you had done, except it would be a helpful thing because of how fully present you were. Well, as Aerosmith once famously said: Dream on. — 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. — George Saunders

The other thing that's useful for me is this notion of the absolute versus the relative:if we walk out and it's a beautiful morning, it's only a beautiful morning because we don't have a broken leg or hemorrhoids or something. — George Saunders

We have to move toward specificity, intelligence, facts, proof, and mutual affection. What I think people have to do now is be very, very assertive about the utter essentiality of intellectual undertakings. — George Saunders

What I'm primarily saying,' he says, 'is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response. Gratitude, and being careful never to make the same mistake twice. — George Saunders

In the Buddhist texts, some of them say, when you die, basically that wild horse gets cut loose, and the mind is incredibly powerful and expansive, omniscient and can go anywhere and see anything, but - and this is the catch - it's colored by the habits of thought we made in life. — George Saunders

It seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment. — George Saunders

I'm not thinking in any big thematic or conceptual terms - especially in this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] when I was trying to make the voices more active, more energetic. — George Saunders

I think about how I conceptualize the audience. The trick is that they've got to be smarter and more worldly than me. So as I'm revising, I'm keeping that in mind. I cannot condescend, even a little bit. Every single choice that I make is motivated by that. — George Saunders

He was a father. That's what a father does.Eases the burdens of those he loves. Saves the ones he loves from painful last images that might endure for a lifetime. — George Saunders

The one thing about A Christmas Carol that always bothers me is that Cratchit is so sweet and perfect. He's like an Ivy League kid who just is labeled "poor." He doesn't have any bad habits. He's never cranky with his kids. — George Saunders

This - where we are now - is where a culture gets to, when it has chosen, for many years, banality over intelligence, the literal over the immaterial or complex, materialism over spirituality. This is the result of many years of disrespecting the intellectual project - of a collective acceptance of the idea that thinking and reasoning and reading deeply in difficult text and being respectful of history are somehow "wimpy" or secondary. — George Saunders

This whole literary game of trying to put yourself in the shoes of your opponent is good for everybody. It leaves you more open-hearted, it gives you a more accurate vision of the other person, because it's more based on curiosity than projection. In the end if you do have to fight, you're better equipped to fight. Also it doesn't leave you damaged at the end, it doesn't leave you hateful or malformed by your own anger. — George Saunders

I know this will sound naïve, but I often wonder what America would be like if our national ethos was simply to minimize suffering. Period. To try, every day, to convert our wonderful wealth and national energy into the cessation of suffering wherever we find it. Imagine if that was our national mindset. Well, we can-we must-dream. — George Saunders

I don't like that new age posture where you kind of tilt your head. I don't like that posture right now. I want something a little more confident and more sure of the values that we're defending, which are the old ones, love and empathy and patience and tolerance and civility. Not to get into politics or anything. — 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. — George Saunders

If you could press a button and your ego investment was less, the toothache would be less. Or less tragic at least. — George Saunders

With fiction, and also with nonfiction that you can take your time doing, you have a much better chance of reaching across the divide and connecting with somebody who is opposed to you on some things. They're opposed to you on one axis, which is politics, but if you go over the axis called puppies, you might find some common ground. — George Saunders

I believe that, when [meeting of writer and reader] happens and the reader goes out into the world the next day, there's some alteration that might possibly inflect the person positively. — George Saunders

I have nothing. My model is I have nothing figured out, and I'm starting with some little nugget and hoping that it will talk back to me enough to let it grow. — George Saunders

I'm turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don't have an infinite number of years left and if there's anything you want to say or represent, it's time to try it. — George Saunders

In the absolute sense - kind of from the God's-eye view - God might feel like, "I made this thing that has all of that in it, all the horror and all the beauty." — George Saunders

In real life, when you have an emotional experience, it's never just because of the thing that's been said. There's the backstory. It's like [Ernest] Hemingway's iceberg theory - the current emotional moment is the tip of the iceberg and all of the past is the seven-eighths of the iceberg that's underwater. — 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. — George Saunders

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. — George Saunders

I keep thinking of Robert Stone making the distinction between the word sublime and the word beautiful. He described being in a battle as sublime. Because even though people were dying, it was such a huge sensory experience that it became sublime. — George Saunders

I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it's a nice way to neutralize that polarization. — George Saunders

If you understand writing as primarily engaging an imaginary reader, well, you've kind of been doing that your whole life. You walk into a room and you're engaging with imaginary strangers because you don't actually know who they are. For me, it was really empowering to say: this is a branch of entertainment and communication and engagement, as opposed to jumping over some perceived literary high bar. That was the buzzkill. — George Saunders

It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it. — George Saunders

Do not really like rich people, as they make us poor people feel dopey and inadequate. Not that we are poor. I would say we are middle. We are very, very lucky. I know that. But still, it is not right that rich people make us middle people feel dopey and inadequate. — George Saunders

In fact unrestrained capitalism is quite cruel and the cost is on the individual human, on his or her grace. — George Saunders

I am always considering the reader. Although this is admittedly kind of odd: Which reader? On what day? In what mood? For me, that "reader" is actually just me, if I had never read the story before. — George Saunders

It seemed to me, in some way, especially when you're looking back at distant historical events, the "Truth" with a capital "T" is kind of the juxtaposition of all the many, many, many truths that seem true to people at the time. — George Saunders

I think that tri [to Ram Bahadur Bomjon] was the first time I'd even seen something that made me think, or really feel: "Ah, I don't know what's really going on in the world - I think I do, and it feels like I do, but whatever is really going on is, de facto, beyond the scope of my comprehension - the best we can do is look for hints." I'd known that intellectually before but that was the first time I really believed it viscerally. — George Saunders

I was thinking about the legacy of ghosts in fiction, and specifically the moral power of those Dickensian ghosts. Because a ghost can be a very powerful but also manipulative element. — George Saunders

I don't use the word lightly, in fact, I don't use it at all, but Ben Marcus is a genius, one of the most daring, funny, morally engaged and brilliant writers, someone whose work truly makes a difference in the world. His prose is, for me, awareness objectified-he makes the word new and thus the world. — George Saunders

I heard Zen teacher one time talking about abortion, and he was saying the way that abortion makes bad karma is any time the person involved pretends that there's not a cost to the choice, one way or the other; whether you get it or don't get it, there's a cost. That's just basic responsibility, to admit that there's a cost. And the bad karma is when you pretend that the thing is free. — George Saunders

When I'm not writing, I tend to get depressed and a little bit surly. And then when I'm writing, suddenly I feel enlivened. Now the only thing as I'm getting older that I notice is that it's a pattern. — George Saunders

Fiction is open to whoever comes in the door, as long as you come in energetically. — George Saunders

Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within. — George Saunders

Some of our writers are starting to incorporate elements of social media, etc. in the work itself, which is all for the good, I think - finding new ways of being poetic. — George Saunders

My mind has an obsessive, neurotic quality, but I also have a very hard work ethic. I know that a lot of people think, oh, you have a wild imagination. I don't, really. If ten people are sitting around and someone says, "Hey complete this sentence in a funny way," I'm never ahead of the pack. — George Saunders

When you write an essay, of course you're going to get pushback, but you're going to be allowed to make your case at leisure. You're going to be allowed to take into account possible objections and to fully humanize your reader. That feels to me like a much more sane thing to do. — George Saunders

I was trained in seismic prospecting. We'd drill a deep hole and put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill. — George Saunders

Life Lessons by George Saunders

1. George Saunders emphasizes the importance of kindness and empathy, teaching us to be conscious of the impact of our words and actions on others.
2. He encourages us to look for the good in people and situations, and to strive to be better versions of ourselves.
3. He also reminds us to take joy in the small moments, to appreciate the beauty of life, and to be grateful for the people we have in our lives.