George Saunders Quotes

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

Every song that I start to write, I wonder if I'll be able to write it.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

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

I know the movies that I've liked, and I know the experience that they've given me, so the goal is always to try to create a movie that I would like myself and that would knock me out, challenge me or intrigue me in some way. That's been my criteria for figuring out what I want to do, or also when I'm writing something or creating a scene.

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

For me, there's a bad year of getting started on something. You write bad stuff and it's awkward to throw it out, and you wait around to get some good ideas that maybe do come or don't come. Until eventually you get the voice and autonomy of the characters, the characters have personality, and they sort of pick up the weight and put it on their shoulders. That's when it becomes a little more fun.

When I get to a point in my book writing when I don't know what I'm going to do next, I'll come back look at underlined passages and see if the images I wrote still have a certain amount of resonance for me.

Writing is?waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday.

As a director you have to be at 30,000 ft objectively looking at everything, wondering if you're making the right objective, emotional, story, character choices. As the writer, while you're asking all of those same questions, you're also forced by the nature of what writing is to be looking at everything under a microscope. That's the difference between the two jobs.

I've been told by people who write historical novels that you just sort of write the emotional truth first, the story at the core, and then you go back and research it at the end.

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

I think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.

You can be moved by an animated film and not by a live action film. There could be great inspiration in and humanity in that animated story.

I sometimes don't know what I'm writing when I start writing it, on some level.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

The entirety of 'Bellocq's Ophelia' was a project, and I was interested in doing research and looking at photographs and writing about them, imagining this woman Ophelia and what her life was like and the kinds of things she thought about.

I'll often dream about characters before I start writing their stories.

When it comes to lyrics, I just write down a lot of things, and only a very tiny fraction of it, I think, is any good.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.