George Saunders Quotes

I've learnt that the world over, everyone's essentially the same. We are all trying to have a nice time and get along with things.

There's a universal inside of me. So if I tell my story, you're going to see parts of your story in it. I don't know which parts, but we all overlap. We're all very much alike.

We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don't act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true.

I have never met a person in whom I did not see myself reflected.

Different people in different parts of the world can be thinking the same thoughts at the same time. It's an obsession of mine: that different people in different places are thinking the same thing but for different reasons. I try to make films which connect people.

I think, really, that the only way a person can open their heart to someone who is so much another is really by knowing them... whether that's in a classroom, or a soccer team, or a food pantry, or any of those things. I mean, we're kind of more alike than we are different.

It's difficult to have any animosity towards someone if you recognize that on so many levels they're exactly the same as you.

You say to yourself: 'What could people, in all these countries, find in my books?' and yet I think we're all the same, anywhere. Everybody is a hero or a dramatic person in their own story if you just know where to look.

No one is ever really a stranger. We cling to the belief that we share nothing with certain people. It's rubbish. We have almost everything in common with everyone.

We have much more in common with other people than we have apart.

One of the things novels should do is shine a light on those parts of us that are common, the fibres that connect all of us. They should convey the sense that we're all connected, coming from the same tree, sharing common roots.

Probably above all other things, I am interested as a writer in making a connection, interested in the parts of all of us that connect.

We're so complex; we're mysteries to ourselves; we're difficult to each other. And then storytelling reminds us we're all the same.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

The irony is that the more specific you are in the portrayal of character, the more like other people you are. In the same way, the more you think about how alone you are in this life, you realise how much a brother and sister everyone else is.

I think my mission, if I could call it that, as a storyteller is to try and find ways to show how similar we are and not how different we are.

I'm a normal person. I'm just like you and just like everyone else - I have feelings and thoughts.

Things that feel super personal actually feel really universal. It's sort of the more you really identify something specific within yourself, the more people connect to it because ultimately we are all connected in some way.

I'm glad that the lyrics reach people and make them understand that we're all the same, really.

That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?

I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.

At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can't be yours alone. [...] Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.

We are more alike than unalike.

It scares me. But then I get this big feeling, simple but exalted: He's like me, just with different details.

The truth of my experience is that we are all a lot more alike than we are different.