George Saunders Quotes

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

I can't imagine writing a screenplay where I didn't feel deeply connected at some kind of visceral level to the material.

I have to feel something emotionally on the story to be able to write for it. I turn things down if I don't feel I'm really right to tell that particular story.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's 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.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

I'm always sorry to finish a book, to let go of characters I love, people I've struggled to understand for years, people who evolve before me.

Every pilot I've ever written, I've fallen deeply and madly in love with. It's the only way I work.

My books are written from the heart, to entertain: they're books I would like to read. Because of that, when I meet people who like them, we have so much to talk about!

I put a lot of myself into my characters when I write.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

I can tell you that I never begin working on a story until I have a title centered at the top of the first page.

Inevitably I draw on my own relationships when I write, so if I'm writing about a fight between a husband and his wife, of course I'm going to think about a recent fight with my husband. Or if I'm writing about sisters, of course I'm going to think about my sister.

My most successful books, the ones that I feel the strongest about, are the ones that started with a premise that for me was deeply emotional.

My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.

Writing the 'Crossfire' series is deeply personal for me, and I love the whole process of it.

I like looking at a book and asking myself, 'How do I replicate that experience I just had as a reader?'

I try to sort of make myself emotional in the moment when I'm writing, and that always translates better. When I'm writing, I can't do abstract.

There's some of me in all my characters.

The stories I work on, especially for any length of time, do tend to become personal to me.

There are fragments of me in all my characters.

I think I write what's interesting to me, and so if I'm reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that's by someone else.

And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing.