George Saunders Quotes

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

It's much easier to write when you're sad. But you can end up isolated and depressed because you almost need to put yourself in that situation to have that angst to write from.

When I'm writing a book, I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.

I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time.

I think at this point I only write books about questions I really want to figure out. They're indulgences, essentially. I think, 'What would I like to spend five years really thinking about? What could I gain from thinking about for five years?'

You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections.

People would much rather argue their own visions and conceptions about a book than engage in a dialogue with the author, because the author could always trump you with, 'I wrote it.'

When I start writing a new imaginary future, I have no idea what it is. The characters arrive first. They help me figure out where they are living and I get to fill in the gaps with that and where we are. So when I get to the end of the process of composition, if I feel that I have really done my job, I have no idea what I've got - and I then spend essentially the rest of my life figuring out what it might mean.

When the ending finally comes to me, I often have to backtrack and make the beginning point towards that ending. Other times, I know exactly what the ending will be before I begin, like with the story "A Brief Encounter With the Enemy." It was all about the ending - that's what motivated me.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

If the reader enters a kind of immersive experience reading a book, then I have to enter a kind of immersive state to do my best work.

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I'm writing - and I think that this is important for all writers - I'm trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I'll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.

You can't know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we're reading or writing.

I realized, in removing or rewriting these jokes, that often the jokes weren't done or that I was using, for me, the curse words as kind of a crutch. So then I just started writing.

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

You hope that people read your book and say "Yes, this is the way it is or could be." But then you have no way of knowing until the reader reads the book. Actually, the critical response doesn't worry me. I've had very few reviews that have upset me.

I've never read a script that I've loved equally and differently to the book.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.

Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.