George Saunders
George Saunders
George Saundersis an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas and children's books. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian until October 2008...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 December 1958
CityAmarillo, TX
CountryUnited States of America
book thinking stories
I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.
country book home
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.
stories kind odd
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.
writing effort important
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.
trying stories firsts
As a writer I'm essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.
grace cost facts
In fact unrestrained capitalism is quite cruel and the cost is on the individual human, on his or her grace.
writing given aspiration
I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations.
wind littles toys
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.
littles stories short-story
I'm very happy - if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I'm thrilled.
thinking ideas people
I love the idea that more people would read short fiction. I think it's such a humanizing form. It softens the boundaries between people.
kids thinking years
I have been married to my wife, Paula, for 25 years. We have wonderful kids. Things are - it's been a really rich life, so I started thinking, is there a way to get valence a little more into the stories, the idea that, yes, things can go wrong, but also they can go right.
intimacy respectful reader
If I can be more efficient, I'm actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.
dancing fiction gravity
Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.
writing trying fiction
The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.