“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
Author: George Saunders
Category: politics
Tags: politics, George Saunders
“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
Author: George Saunders
Category: fear
Tags: fear, George Saunders
“We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate – and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.”
— George Saunders
Author: George Saunders
Category: age
Tags: age, 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
Author: George Saunders
Category: positive
Tags: positive, George Saunders
“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
Author: George Saunders
Category: intelligence
Tags: intelligence, 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
Author: George Saunders
Category: truth
Tags: truth, George Saunders