George Saunders Quotes

I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.

The writer has to make pleasure for the reader - which, I think, is done by taking one's character's seriously and taking one's readers seriously -don't condescend or try to be tricky. Be a friend to your reader - I'd say that's a pretty good first step.

I want to earn a reader's capacity to be moved.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

By making the place and the people and the feelings real, by the time someone closes the cover of one of my books, they have, hopefully, felt all of the emotions of life.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

I love to entertain, I love to make people laugh, cry, and move them, perhaps moving them in their lives.

I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.

We like movies and books that give us this emotionally moving experience, where you feel like a slightly different person, and you see the world a little different after you finish. It lets you see your own life in a different way, and it actually makes you feel really good.

I love movies that make me cry, because they're tapping into a real emotion in me, and I always think afterwards: how did they do that?

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

I don't cry at books or movies. Ever. So imagine my shock and awe when I read 'The Time Traveler's Wife' for the second time, and I knew the ending, and I started to cry.

With 'A Northern Light,' I've already heard from teenage readers, teachers, librarians - it's been so gratifying. It's amazing that you can take something that matters so deeply to you and make it matter to someone else.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

I think, above all, the characters in my novels feel universal to the readers.

You want people to feel something when you tell a story, whether they feel happy or whether they feel sad.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

The big thing for me is to make films that you feel, whether you feel happy, whether you feel sad, whether you feel sick; it's to make the audience feel so that the next day they remember what they saw.

Don't ever let the other stuff get in the way of your inherent skills as a kick-butt storyteller. Move the reader, make them happy and sad and excited and scared. Make them stare into space after they've put the book down, thinking about the tale that's become a part of them.

My purpose as a writer is to communicate in such a way as to challenge the thinking of readers and touch their hearts.

I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

I think every time I can find a story that touches that human nerve, and even sometimes makes you cry, I think that I've found something that I'll like very much.