George Saunders Quotes

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

A baby writer should take inspiration from her predecessors but also find ways to tell her own stories in her own way.

Every writer knows that when you're imitating somebody - you know, you're sounding like Faulkner - you're doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn't Faulkneresque.

All writers are mimics, and I'm not interested in picking up somebody else's style or voice.

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.

I enjoy, in the summer, getting back to writing in my own voice.

TV is all about learning to write in someone else's voice, so if you do it long enough without selling your own project, they assume you don't have your own voice; you're just a good mimic.

Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.

Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people.

...if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.

I don't have a style. I wouldn't say I have a style as a writer, either. I know people have said "This is what he does," but when I'm writing, I don't think about that. I don't think about a style.

It's not knowing how to write that makes you interesting, it's what you write.

It's hard work to find your own voice and not to copycat anything.

You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling.

The hardest part is not to repeat yourself. I don't really believe my core obsessions are going to change, but you need to look for ways to express them that are different. The main reason for doing that is not to bore yourself, and obviously, I don't want to bore readers.

I feel like the point of being an artist is to have your own voice: to do it the way you would do it and not the way anyone else would do it. If you're a strong enough writer, then that voice is going to come out all the time, and I can't stop it from coming out, no matter what I do.

Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

I feel like it's important, especially at young age, to find exactly what it is that makes your style so important as opposed to just trying to fit into the iconic styles of performers out there.

I prefer writing originals.

When you find a song that you love, you just have to do it - why would I try to match it? When I wrote more of the songs in the '90s - 'Nick of Time' and other songs I was surprised I came up with - it was because nobody else was saying what I wanted to say.

We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you're doing so.

We call ourselves creators and we just copy.

I've never really tried to copy anyone; I like to have my own style.

No man was ever great by imitation.