George Saunders Quotes

We don't believe other people's experiences can tell us all that much about our own. I think this is an illusion of uniqueness.

I have a problem when people say something's real or not real, or normal or abnormal. The meaning of those words for me is very personal and subjective. I've always been confused and never had a clearcut understanding of the meaning of those kinds of words.

I can hold space for people who think I'm a nut job. It's cool. But I know from my own experience what I experienced. I know what I learned. I know what I saw. I know what I heard.

One of the things I've really come to realise is that the chances of arriving at a universal truth are increased if you remain absolutely faithful to the contingencies of your own experience and the vagaries of your own nature.

Well, we studied a lot of books and things like that. Denzel has a personal experience with it, not himself, that's his business-I won't get into that, but he knows a lot about it as well. So, we took some real life experiences that we both-I've been told that I have OCD.

Only one absolute certainty is possible to man, namely that at any given moment the feeling which he has exists.

Life comes first, an art not rooted in human experience is not worth a damn, but different kinds of minds have different kinds of experience, and all I ask of any man is validity; and there should be place for every type and kind of mind.

I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

People are so obsessed with that these days. As long as you're healthy, what difference do a few pounds make? Crazy diets. Thirteen-year-old girls on magazine covers who wind up in hospitals because they're so anorexic. Real women don't look like that. And who wants them to? No one wants a woman who looks sick or like she;s been from a refugee camp.

Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that's performing the logic.

You should never argue with a crazy mind, you ought to know my now.

If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to trurh.

As important as politics are to me, the life and the spirit of people's emotions are much more important. People live real lives where they love and grieve and feel pain and joy and that is a whole separate sphere. All that political stuff, I believe in it strongly, but not as strongly as I believe that at some point you or someone is going to need a song to sit with and comfort them in a hard time.

Insanity is a legal term. Crazy is an art form.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

There is no order of things except in the human mind.

You know what truth is? [...] It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, "Yeah, yeah - ain't it the truth?

The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.

Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind.

It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.

In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.

Everybody's entitled to their own experience.

Keep in mind that I'm crazy, won't you?

I think people dream in their own way, dreams are extremely personal, even from person to person. They are completely individual.