A Quote by George Saunders
Nothing will turn you into a Civil War buff like five years of reading. Some of the letters that people wrote from that time are so deep and so beautifully articulate. And you realize, especially with the stuff that's going on now in America, that it's always been chaos - people were disagreeing at least as much as they are now and 20,000 people would die in a day. It's the scale that's amazing, and also the proximity to our own time.
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I find the English amazing how they got over 7/7. There were no multiple memorials with people sobbing as they would have been in America. There, they are constantly scaring people, but at the same time, people think nothing of going to see a therapist.
This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!
Of course this is Vegas and it is the melting pot for all over the world, but people from all over the world know Donny and Marie. It is amazing. I have been in the business a long time to realize careers can be fleeting. Five years is a long career nowadays for some people, and here we are still going strong after 40 years.
I've been a performer in the public eye for many years now and it's much darker. It feels so worse now. It feels heavy; it's difficult to deal with. The hatred is unbelievable, but I actually feel a lot more compassion for the journalists and people who aren't used to that. At least on some level, it's been a part of my world for a long time, so I can handle it. I'm not going to say that I'm used to it, because I'm not. I think it's really difficult for people who are just doing journalism and receiving death threats on a very consistent basis.
Many of us are returning from a long journey during which we were forced to search for things that were of no interest to us. Now we realize that they were false. But this return cannot be made without pain, because we have been away for a long time and feel that we are strangers in out own land. It will take some time to find the friends who also left, and the places where our roots and treasures lie. But this will happen.
For a long time, I thought when you do a box set, you're giving up; you're saying, 'OK, I don't have anything left.' But now I've listened to some of the old stuff I haven't heard in 20 to 40 years with fresh ears. It's like, 'Oh yeah, I can see where people might want to to hear some of this stuff that didn't make it onto the records.'
Winning slowly is another way of losing. Americans are screwing up our health care system again right now. That's going to cause grave trouble for people over the next five, 10 years. There are going to be lots of people who die, lots of people who are sick. It's going to be horrible. But 10 years from now it will not be harder to solve the problem because you ignored it for those 10 years. With climate change, that's not true. As each year passes, we move past certain physical tipping points that make it impossible to recover large parts of the world that we have known.
Five years is a very long time. If you think about it in terms of just people's lives, in terms of who our audience is: if you were in high school when you first saw our stuff, you're in college now.
I always tell people what I did 50 years ago as a teenager is now 4,000 times easier to do today than when I did it. Technology breeds crime - it always has and it always will. There's always going to be people willing to use technology in a negative, self-serving way. So today it's much easier, whether it's forging checks or getting information. People go on Facebook and tell you what car they drive, their mother's name, where you are going on vacation, where you've been on vacation. There's nothing you can't research in a matter of a couple of minutes and find out about someone.
I have been doing stuff for a long time now and you would be in people's consciousness. But when you get something like a gift to play Ted Hastings, and some fabulous writing to get behind and a great crew, it suddenly allows people to go - 'I always knew he was good.'
There was a point where if you had told me I was going to be a national morning anchor, I would probably have been terrified. But now, I feel prepared. I've been in the business for almost 20 years now. I'm almost forty years old and I've been doing this for a long time, so I felt like, "Okay, I'm ready to do this."
Barack Obama was amazing, but he wasn't perfect. We all know that. He was the closest thing to perfect America's ever had. We were basking in the glow. We forgot that there's always going to be a backlash within a movement every time. When I think about race, there were a lot of pockets of people that were still living in fear under the Obama administration, but we were in this blissful celebration mode. Now we are constantly reminded that, although there are lots of good people in the world, there are just as many horrible people.
If U.S. focuses on truth and justice, we'll realize that Israel has been there for 3,000 years - the same language, the same people, the same culture for 3,000 years - and it's always astonishing to me that we somehow now think that they're the occupiers.
I've just come to realize I'm going to share my point of view. Some people won't like me for it. Some people will. I will work every day to be as honest as I can because I do believe that we're all trying to get to the same place. But various people have tricked us into believing that we are not. And I see America going into that space.
I do remember, one time, a man came to me after the students began to work in Mississippi and he said the white people were getting tired and they were getting tense and anything might happen. Well, I asked him "how long he thinks we had been getting tired"? I have been tired for 46 years and my parents was tired before me and their parents were tired, and I have always wanted to do something that would help some of the things I would see going on among Negroes that I didn't like and I don't like now.
For 6,000 years, these rules have been unquestionably right. And yet we break them every day. People feel that something is wrong in life. There is some kind of atmosphere that makes people now turn to other values. They want to contemplate the basic questions of life, and that is probably the real reason for wanting to tell these stories.
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