George Saunders
The millions or billions of micro decisions that you're going to make, that's what will determine who you are as a writer, not you deciding in advance.Collection: Decision
One of the ways that we cope with anxiety is by over planning and over controlling. If we know where it's going to, we can just relax and do it. Unfortunately, in my experience, that's not the way it works. The story doesn't want to be told what to do. You have to enter into this process with a high level of trust that the many hours of choosing that you're doing every day will gradually clarify the narrative for you. And that's what happens.Collection: Anxiety
My mind has an obsessive, neurotic quality, but I also have a very hard work ethic. I know that a lot of people think, oh, you have a wild imagination. I don't, really. If ten people are sitting around and someone says, "Hey complete this sentence in a funny way," I'm never ahead of the pack.Collection: Hard Work
As much as we - in a revisionist way - tell ourselves that we've always been a righteous country with a couple of swerves off the path, we need to look back and see that we've always also been a racist country and have had a tendency towards banal aggressiveness. The thing that's alarming is not so much that a few people in America at the top are initiating these crazy policies, but that the middle is willing to go there too. There's a strange movement of the middle to this position of banal aggressiveness.Collection: Country
I believe that, when [meeting of writer and reader] happens and the reader goes out into the world the next day, there's some alteration that might possibly inflect the person positively.Collection: Believe
To understand any plea for further consideration of a group you don't know anything about to be some form of, quote, political correctness. These things are bubbling right under us.Collection: Political
When I wrote that [Donald] Trump piece, I had this uncomfortable experience of sensing a lot of things that were nascent, that I couldn't quite articulate. And one of them was this move toward anti-intellectualism. An anti-love move, even.Collection: Moving
That seems to be the definition of ‘novel’ for me: a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Stories
If I’m writing a story and you’re reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process.Collection: Reading
Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by ‘The New Yorker.’Collection: Stories
Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Stories
I love the feeling of being on the hunt – the feeling that the story is refusing to be solved in some lesser way and is insisting that you see it on its highest terms.Collection: 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.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Stories
I’m very happy – if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I’m thrilled.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Country