George Saunders Quotes

I mean, I'll say the filthiest things in the world, but when it comes down to it, I'm kind of a prude.

The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways.

We see every day that our very laws have both sides of the fence.

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

There's a duality of a guy calling on God: 'Where are you when I need you?' and then, at the same time, 'God helps those who help themselves.' I think that contradiction does exist in all of us, those of faith and those who profess to have no faith.

I realise there's an innate paradox in promoting oneself on the one hand and saying, 'Oh, I don't want to be famous,' on the other.

A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected... that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.

[Dwight Eisenhower is] a soldier who doesn't like or want war. It's like a whore who believes in chastity.

Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.

Daniel Bryan looks like he doesn't want the attention, but he does. He acts like he doesn't want the notoriety, but he does.

The body is our enemy, and yet is our friend.

It was a brutal picture, a tug-of-war between two equal but opposing impulses. It had the ring of truth, however.

Everybody is God. Everybody is the devil. And if you don't realize you have both parts, that's what really causes problems.

I loved feeling special. I hated feeling special.

Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.

Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.

We're all living contradictions, trying to survive in a world filled with hypocrites

I am a misanthrope yet utterly benevolent.

Essentially, I'm a very real person; good and bad. And the public image is one of being very good, I suppose. But one of the reasons I'm attracted to people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Christ, to pacifism, is because naturally, I'm the guy that would not turn the other cheek - but, when people see you're attracted to that, they think you are that.

It means we're looking one way, while following another. We're for one side and also the other. We mean what we say, but our intentions are different.

I am a man of peace [so he told Mother, but it always appeared to me that he was the most belligerent man of peace I had ever encountered]

Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.

They were on the side of the angels, even if the angels weren't entirely sure that this was a good thing.

You should stop and listen to yourselves sometimes. 'We're practically adults, let us run wild.' 'We're only kids, leave us alone.'...You can't have it both ways.