#hi

I didn't want kids to think that to be happy, they had to be famous or rich or live in the big city. ↗

— Dan Savage

#big #big city #city #famous #had

I was a straight arrow, a control freak. I didn't do drugs or drink, and this was the '70s. I didn't like the loss of control. Which isn't exactly right, because I didn't know what happened when you did drugs. ↗

— George Saunders

#because #control #control freak #did #drink

I was trained in seismic prospecting. We'd drill a deep hole and put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill. ↗

— George Saunders

#bottom #deep #drill #dynamite #give

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph. ↗

— George Saunders

#i #lot #novel #now #paragraph

When I'm explaining something to you, if I'm being long-winded, and twisty in a non-productive way, I could make you feel vaguely insulted. And you'd have a right to be. ↗

— George Saunders

#could #explaining #feel #i #insulted

I've had the thought that a person's 'artistic vision' is really just the cumulative combination of whatever particular stances he has sincerely occupied during his creative life - even if some of those might appear contradictory. ↗

— George Saunders

#artistic #combination #contradictory #creative #creative life

It seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment. ↗

— George Saunders

#actually #consciousness #course #create #day

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore. ↗

— George Saunders

#cut #fiction #funny #happened #hasn

My habit would have been to veer towards the dark - to prove I was something; edgy, or maybe to prove that I was cognisant of the dark side. Now, with age and confidence, I can say, yeah, that's true, but I am cognisant of the fact that people can do things well. And can be more loving than you expect. ↗

— George Saunders

#am #been #confidence #dark #dark side

So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity. ↗

— George Saunders

#gothic #had #i #i may not #makes