George Saunders Quotes

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

Everything I've written is personal - it's the only way I know how to write.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.

I just write what I want to write.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

I still write the same way and have the same perspective.

Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me.

I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.

I like writing my own material - I'm pretty good at it.

I don't really think about genre. I like to write books that I'd love to read myself.

I can only write what I would be interested in.

I don't have an audience in mind when I write. I'm writing mainly for myself. After a long devotion to playwriting I have a good inner ear. I know pretty well how a thing is going to sound on the stage, and how it will play. I write to satisfy this inner ear and its perceptions. That's the audience I write for.

I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.

It's okay to embark on writing because you think it will get you love. At least it gets you going, but it doesn't last. After a while you realize that no one cares that much. Then you find another reason: money. You can dream on that one while the bills pile up. Then you think: "Well, I'm the sensitive type. I have to express myself." Do me a favor. Don't be so sensitive. Be tough. It will get you further along when you get rejected. Finally, you just do it because you happen to like it.

I'm going to work with Dan Clowes. After Charlie Kaufman, it's hard to fill up the gap. It's hard to find somebody who... A lot of writers, I can clearly see the desire of succeeding before the desire of expressing themselves. Sometimes people get upset when you want to be different. You were talking about "whimsical," which is a nice word. But sometimes they use the word "quirky" in the pejorative sense. I get frustrated, because they feel like I'm doing whatever I want, and there is no ground, and I don't really care. They feel it's cynical. But I don't think I have any cynicism in me.

To a great extent, I still write for myself, write what amuses me. Fortunately, I have a quirky sort of strange sense of humor that appeals to other people and that's good. I still sort of write for myself though there are some areas of the book I feel I have to put in and I feel I have to deliver.

If you're writing on your own, each character is just you. It's just you.

I've never written for anybody else. For me, it was a challenge. I write for me. I don't write for anybody else. And what was good about it was that I was writing for somebody I knew. I knew what my mother thinks and how she feels. So it was finding that creative spirit to write about my mother.

I don't think I could form my writing into scripts or novels. It's so sporadic. My writing's pretty poor. I often think, "Who's this for?" Sometimes it's impressions of the day or my life, or it's fiction. Sometimes it's about things I want to remember, or I try to write in really awful French.

There is no greater pleasure for me than to practice and exhibit my art.

I always seem to write personal songs; that's always been my go-to thing, to write about what I'm experiencing.

Until I became a published writer, I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject ... they would have spoiled my natural style; made me observe caution; would have hedged me with rules.

You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you

There's a great quote about Virginia Woolf, she had the same spiritual stake in her diaries as she had in her writing.