George Saunders Quotes

Art has been good for my soul. And it's been good for my brain. I think I'm a better painter now than I was a musician growing up. You struggle to see things and translate an image through your hands to a canvas.

Sometimes, trying to make a work of art can be very difficult and very painful.

There is no such thing as being done with an artistic life. Frustrations and rewards exist at all levels on the path.

There's more things that I'd like to do. You know, each song is a little bit of a puzzle. I see most of them as just failed attempts.

I take this art very seriously and passionately. I love what I do. You can't help but grow. That's not to say you don't make mistakes or make bad choices, but that's part of the art. Painters paint bad paintings.

People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.

Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.

I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness.

Art is something in which you are never an expert at any point of time. It's something you hone all the time and something which is elusive all the time.

I've said very openly that the first aspect of my artistry to arrive was writing. It took me a good number of years to find my voice.

Making art has taught me that the tiniest smidgen of progress is something to be cherished.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

I lose faith every time I have to start a new page, and this is no joke. I've occasionally been criticized over the past couple of years for publicly "complaining" about how difficult drawing comics is, yet I've only mentioned it so that the younger cartoonists who are trying it out and finding it difficult and painful realize that they're not alone. There's not really any set way of learning how to do this, and it's always a struggle to improve, and, more importantly, see accurately whether or not one's work is communicating any shred of feeling or truth at all.

I feel like a lot of time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decorations. But no tree. You're going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we'll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon.

I am just beginning to understand what it is to paint. A painter should have two lives, one in which to learn, and one in which to practice his art.

What still concerns me the most is: am I on the right track, am I making progress, am I making mistakes in art?

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

An artist conscientiously moves in a direction which for some good reason he takes, putting one work in front of the other with the hope he'll arrive before death overtakes him.

My friend advised me to go into studying art, which at first shocked me because art was so easy. It was just something I did, like breathing or brushing my teeth. It couldn't be a job. I had a much more difficult time writing plays, making myself sit at that typewriter and finish those things.

I think that when you create something or at least try to create something, you slither between excitement and pleasure and you understand this huge emotional frustration. You did one feat, then you go back one.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be.

In reality, however, an artist is a product of art

A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.

Going to the office of some stranger and waiting in a line, in a hallway, with five other guys who look just like you, waiting your turn to go in and embarrass yourself, and then waiting around for feedback, which never comes. I really like that. For a young artist, it seems like the perfect thing to be doing, humiliation, over and over and over and over. Which I'm sure can't be the way that some people look at it, but I thought that was so great. The point of it is if you make your own stuff you don't have to deal with other people's bullshit.