George Saunders Quotes

Normally I begin writing a song with just with aim to express something, and sometimes I don't know what I want to express until a sentence comes to my head that will sum up everything about how I'm feeling at the time.

If I have something inside me that I want to get out, I'll just beat it out on the banjo right then and there.

I'm not the sad sack that people might think I am. But I think that if I didn't write and perform, I probably would be.

Composing is an emotional thing.

I don't know why I write. The honest answer is that I don't have an answer. I wouldn't die if I couldn't write fiction. Actually keel over and die - it's unlikely. But quite quickly writing has come to feel like the only thing I really know how to do. And I go a bit stir crazy if I don't write more or less every day. But that makes writing sound like a mood-regulator, a way to regulate anxiety or depression, and it doesn't really come down to that.

We all need to have a creative outlet - a window, a space - so we don't lose track of ourselves.

To be and to be creative are synonymous. It is impossible to be and not to be creative. But that impossible thing has happened, that ugly phenomenon has happened, because all your creative sources have been plugged, blocked, destroyed, and your whole energy has been forced into some activity that the society thinks is going to pay.

I don't want to say the wrong thing, which I always do. I think I do better when I sing.

There are things that are shadow sides of the creative energy that are negative and all that kind of stuff. The only thing that I say to myself is, in the spirit of that quote from the Gnostic Gospels: Writing is a way to let all that stuff out into the sun.

I started to write songs. And I started to like what I was writing. I think it's a new way for me to express things that are closer to myself than when I play a role, because, of course, it's really not me. I'm finding a new way. I don't know what it's going to be. But I know that I will need to give it to people one day.

I love the energy that comes when I get on the mic. It keeps me creative and I love to hear what the fans want, what they love or hate about it.

As you continue the work of acknowledging and claiming the gifts of your past and standing in the power of your present, you are freeing up enormous reserves of creative energy.

I was working with D'Mile - he's amazing! And I don't know, it was like that guitar riff was so crazy to me, and so I think I was frustrated about something that happened earlier and I feel like I'm just a good guy, I don't cut people off, I don't really call people out when they do stuff that they should be called out on, and I'm just always the one being the bigger person. So, that day "Gangster" just came out. That's just how I feel in that day to day life.

I think I have always had a pretty strong creative impulse. And that has probably saved me from abandoning myself completely.

Think of the wonders uncorked by wine! It opens secrets, gives heart to our hopes, pushes the cowardly into battle, lifts the load from anxious minds, and evokes talents. Thanks to the bottle's prompting no one is lost for words, no one who's cramped by poverty fails to find release.

Writing is my vacation from living.

Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.

If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness.

Writing is not just a job. It helps me to pray. It's a way of being.

Music is very inspiring to me because "true" music releases a true energy that is just inspiring. It's like when you see a beautiful painting or a wonderful film. You just receive this creative energy, and all of a sudden you want to create too.

I think you often have that sense when you write--that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.

Writing is a strong easement for perplexity. My life is a map, spread out with all the rivers and hills showing.

I think each album does have a different energy, otherwise you'd be doing the same thing again and not experimenting anew... Albums are such autobiographical material, not in the material but as an expression of what you're like at the time.

I talk about things in music that I would never talk about with my best friends, which I think seems like a weird thing, but my justification in my head as to why it's okay is because it's cryptic enough and there's enough meat around it to make it all okay and no one can really prove what any of the songs mean.