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 | truth Read More »
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.
George Saunders | sympathy Read More »
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.
George Saunders | society Read More »
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 | positive Read More »
I turned 54 this year and I find myself feeling like I’m in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life – or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations.
George Saunders | positive Read More »
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 | politics Read More »
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.
George Saunders | intelligence Read More »
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 | home Read More »
The word ‘funny’ is a bit like the word ‘love’ – we don’t have enough words to describe the many varieties.
George Saunders | funny Read More »