Top 464 Quotes & Sayings by George Saunders - Page 8

I have this tendency to take a little bit of questionable knowledge and riff on it.

There are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven't died yet.

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

I like [Barak] Obama. I like him. So how far does rationality help to persuade anybody? You know, I'm not so sure.

From the beginning [of the Lincoln in the Bardo], I actually had it in mind not to write a novel. I'd kind of gotten past that point where I felt bad for never having written a novel, even to where I felt really good about it, like I was a real purist.

What's really baffling to me is the way that the technology has risen up to help us become more materialistic.

I don't feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.

There was one sequence of days [making Lincoln in the Bardo] when I had halfway decided to use the historical nuggets, but I wasn't quite sure it would work. I'd be in my room for six or seven hours, cutting up bits of paper with quotes and arranging them on the floor, with this little voice in my head saying, "Hey, this isn't writing!" But at the end of that day, I felt that the resulting section was doing important emotional work

Maybe you could even think 100,000 people are inside each human being. And you drop a novel on that person, and a certain number of those sub-people come alive or get reenergized for some finite time.

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.

I think when you see [Donald] Trump in person, my reaction is you kind of enjoy it. It's kind of an enjoyable night out.

I'm starting to withdraw from [technology] as much as I can. I don't do much of the social media stuff. Like, if I'm on Facebook, it changes my relation to the real world in a way that makes me feel sick - almost like I've had too much sugar or something.

The internet kind of feels like happiness sometimes, however. It feels like stimulation.

I'm a control freak. I'm defensive. And I'm an egomaniac. That's true about me.

There were several points where I would kind of turn to the book and say, "Get thee behind me." I don't think real novelists do that. But I make a distinction between prose that's very efficiency-minded (like, the minimum I can get away with), versus loosening the screws and letting the words spill out beautifully and so on.

A person supporting [Donald]Trump likes Trump. And I think they would say the same about me.

[Reading Swing Time] made me a feel a little bit like when I used to read David [Foster] Wallace. Like, "I can't play that game. I wish I could, but I can't do it."

Social media sometimes feels like a vehicle for one-dimensional sniping, more than true criticism.

What was fun for me with this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was to start out with the principle that went, "We're going to fight every day to make this not a novel; make it too short to be a novel." And then with that principle in place, the book sort of starts to say, "Okay, but I really need this. I really need some historical nuggets." And you're like, "All right, but keep it under control."

The beginning [of Lincoln in the Bardo] is strange, and I did a lot of work calibrating that so that a reader with a certain level of patience would get through it and in the nick of time start to figure out what was going on. In a short book, you can do that.

Let's say there's something operating in you called Mind. It's very powerful, but it's dampened by the body, by physicality. When you die, that tether gets cut and off the mind goes with incredible power.

It blew my mind, reading Swing Time, that I could take any sentence in the book, and it was one of the most beautiful sentences written in English.

Some of Buddhist texts say that, in the moment after you die, you think of New Jersey and you go to New Jersey or you think of 1820 and you go to 1820. Also, all your sort of inner-symbology gets writ large. So, if you're a Christian, you see Christian iconography.

Just through the process of trying to make the living and the dead feel real, all these little benefits came out. And these benefits turned out to be much more articulate statements of what I really believe. And somehow they were more convincing because they were arrived at at such length.

I sometimes think that I can't do the bigger thing that [Zadie Smith] do so beautifully, as in Swing Time, with so much world in it and so much rapturous paint thrown around. I don't think it would be possible to write a book on that scale with as much OCD as I have.

I don't mind being criticized intelligently; although I don't love it.

I think when you get to export your creative impulse into something, it kind of lessens that busy energy that can be so confrontational and pissy.

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.

In my personal and spiritual life, I reject that. I don't believe in that. I'm always trying to get my mind into a less judgmental place, making less rigid judgments about things like "perverse" versus "pure." But in terms of prose, those sorts of oppositions seem to work.

What I really found myself interested in was the idea that our minds our so powerful and when we're living, the mind is dampened by the body. As crazy as our minds can get, they're only so crazy because they're physically housed.

The book says [Lincoln in the Bardo],"I really need this sci-fi device of a ghost inhabiting another person." You say okay kind of begrudgingly. So the structure seemed informed by need and efficiency.

For me, things were either very sullied or very pure, very controlled or very under-controlled.

Whole swaths of the book [Lincoln in the Bardo] are made up of verbatim quotes from various historical sources, which I cut up and rearranged to form part of the narrative.

[Lincoln in the Bardo] is not a long book. And that meant I could obsess over it and live in it both backwards and forwards and hyper-control everything.

There's not a lot of whimsicality in the form, not a lot of indulgence allowed. Like when I was younger, I would sometimes go, "Oh, every other section will be narrated by a chair." Or, "It will be a double helix shape!" That never really worked.

I had to go in and do the work of toning [invented "historical" bits] down in order to make them fit [in Lincoln in the Bardo]. It's like if you're an actor and you're always overacting, well, you're a bad actor. But if you're an actor who subdues yourself to the extent that's necessary, then you're really acting.

I don't really write beautifully naturally, unlike some people.

As a kid, I had a real fascination with perverse, off-color, and kind of risky things, and I also had a very sanctimonious Catholic, purist side.

I do find the values in A Christmas Carol significant. It is important not to be mean and stingy and not to give up love for money.

One of the ideas that runs through this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] is this Buddhist notion that the mind is incredibly powerful; not the brain but the mind.

Ralph Kramden, as played by Jackie Gleason, was this big bumbling New York City bus driver who was kind of mean and crass and a little bit egotistical. But underneath it all, he was a big heart looking for a place to land I think.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that whatever weirdness was going to be in there, I felt, had to be earned. And it had to be required by the emotional needs of the book.

Whole idea is really intriguing to me. If you took snapshots of ourselves throughout the day, the way that our mind is twisting and turning, then at the moment of death, the mind would be twisting and turning in the same way. But the Buddhists say it's super-sized because there's no bodily damper on it.

I knew if I evoked that stuff too easily or gratuitously, as a way of assuaging my fears of not being edgy or whatever, the writing would fall apart. This book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was going to have to have some earnestness in it.