Happy birthday, George Saunders! 67, today! Here are some quotes from Saunders’s writing:

“Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”

“We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate—and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish. Hilarious!”

“Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”

“To me, fiction is the ultimate form of ‘doing something.’ An idea or notion or image leaves the writer’s mind, goes directly into the reader’s, and has the potential to change what it finds there.”

“Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”

“I like the idea that a work of fiction is basically just some timeless human dilemma, dressed up in contemporary clothing.”

“An artist works outside the realm of strict logic. Simply knowing one’s intention and then executing it does not make good art.”

“Revising…is a form of increasing the ambient intelligence of a piece of writing. This, in turn, communicates a sense of respect for your reader. As text is revised, it becomes more specific and embodied in the particular. It becomes more sane. It becomes less hyperbolic, sentimental, and misleading. It loses its ability to create a propagandistic fog. Falsehoods get squeezed out of it, lazy assertions stand up, naked and blushing, and rush out of the room.”

“What I’ve found over my years of writing is that straightforward realism doesn’t get me where I want to go. I don’t have that gift. My realist writing feels too safe and reactionary—I feel more outrage in day-to-day living than a realist approach allows me to express. Or: when I think of what’s actually going on here—the briefness of life vs the ‘normalized’ way we go through our days (denying death, planning very sanely for everything, as if we’re going to live forever) it feels that conventional narrative is insufficient. It’s kind of like, if you see a snake and it scares the shit out of you, typing, ‘Suddenly I saw a snake’ doesn’t get it—has nothing to do with what you felt in that instant. How to use or exploit or get at that (having-seen-snake) energy? The energy of what you actually felt in that instant? That’s the question. And the answer—the prose that could achieve that—might have fuck-all to do with snakes, if you see what I mean.”

“We often think that the empathetic function in fiction is accomplished via the writer’s relation to his characters, but it’s also accomplished via the writer’s relation to his reader. You make a rarefied place (rarefied in language, in form; perfected in many inarticulable beauties—the way two scenes abut; a certain formal device that self-escalates; the perfect place at which a chapter cuts off); and then welcome the reader in. She can’t believe that you believe in her that much; that you are so confident that the subtle nuances of the place will speak to her; she is flattered. And they do speak to her. This mode of revision, then, is ultimately about imagining that your reader is as humane, bright, witty, experienced, and well-intentioned as you, and that, to communicate intimately with her, you have to maintain the state, through revision, of generously imagining her. You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: ‘No, she’s smarter than that. Don’t dishonour her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.’ And in revising your reader up, you revise yourself up too.”

“But it seems to me that if we want to look at, say, ‘love,’ using fiction as the lens, then we’d really want to challenge love: give it something to push back against; construct a situation in which it could show its true colors, so to speak.”

“A writer’s flaws are what he has to work with. To get any forward momentum, I have to make stories that have drama, which for me often means putting some overt threat in there. And I’m not subtle. To make ‘threats’ and thereby ‘drama’ I will just—you know, create a kindergarten teacher and then introduce an approaching Mongol horde. In the midst of a crisis is where we get the true measure of a character, and thus some new feeling about human tendency.”

“Anyway, what I really think good writing does: It enlivens that part of us that actually believes we are in this world, right now, and that being here somehow matters. It reawakens the reader to the fact and the value of her own existence.”

“I don’t believe at all in the Deep Dark Secret theory of literature: this idea that there is a right or a wrong about a given story or a given approach. My own pathetic output is proof that, at least in my case, Mastery is totally elusive. For me, every story is a whole new set of problems, expressed in a whole new language, plus my glasses are out of prescription, and its raining. So I am a very humble writer and a very humble reader, flinchy even.”

“I think a character who is basically like the writer and the reader (good, sensible, intelligent, well-intentioned, and so on) is going to produce a more deeply felt ride. Fiction gets most under our skin, I think, when we find it impossible to distance ourselves from the narrated dilemma. What creates distance is when we look at a character and think, ‘Nope, not me, I would never have reacted that way.’ Whereas if the character does pretty much what we would do in the given situation, and thinks the way we would think—then we can’t step away from him when the shit hits the fan.”

“There’s something very heartening about teaching, in a ‘There’s nothing new under the sun’ way: You realize that there have always been, and will always be, young artistic people in the world who, being relatively new to the world, are freshly amazed by its beauty.”

“There’s something wonderful about spending a day taking apart a Tolstoy story to see how it works, and then getting up the next morning, feeling like: Okay, I’m still alive, still writing, still part of that lineage—and therefore there’s still a chance that, one day, I’ll do something good.”

“Well, just between you and me, I hate short stories. But I became addicted to the big bucks that being a career short story writer brings. But finally I’ve had enough and am going to write a novel, even if I have to take a pay cut and risk losing my audience and give up on movie rights and all of that. I don’t care, I’m all about the art.”

“So far it’s a lot of fun, and about every other day it seems like a big fiasco, a completely unviable train wreck, which, based on my experience with stories, indicates that it might be a worthy adversary.”

“So much of what I am doing in my fiction is just trying to get into interesting places in terms of language or form, places that don’t bore me. And this happens via hundreds of quick micro-decisions that are done “to taste,” so to speak. So the experience is one of groping toward that interesting place – trying to leap away from anything that seems boring, or about which I don’t have strong opinions. Essentially trying to avoid that moment where, devoid of any strong feeling, I start conceptualizing.”

“Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others).”

“I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That’s really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects—a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world. And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them—I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode.”

“The writer, in order to proceed, is theoretically trying to predict where his complex skein of language and image has left his reader, who he has likely never met and who is actually thousands of readers.”

“What concerns me most is the horrible degradation our notions of truth, civility, and decency have undergone. Also the way that language has been malformed—we have been overcome with banality and the cynical misuse of language. When a candidate runs a campaign on a series of dog-whistles to bigots, then turns around and talks about ‘healing the wounds of division,’ that is right out of Orwell.”

“I think fiction at its best can serve as a moment of induced bafflement that calls into question our usual relation to things and reminds us that our minds, as nice as they are, aren’t necessarily up to the task of living, and shouldn’t get cocky.”

“When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn’t see it. He can’t. He’s average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.”

“I’m always aware of writing around things I can’t do, and I’ve come to think that that’s actually what ‘style’ is—an avoidance of your deficiencies.”

“More and more, I have no idea what I think of anything. It’s as if the world were this very strange beast under a big tarp. Writing is a way of poking at the tarp. You can watch what the beast does during the poking and maybe surmise something about the sort of beast it is, but you also don’t want to be too confident in your theories. I really like the fact that, these days, I can’t say what writing is for, what it’s supposed to do, or how it’s supposed to affect us. I just like doing it.”

“In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I’m really never sure of what I really believe.”

“It was bliss. It was perfection. It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.”

“The realization that failure was possible, even for me, had the effect of increasing my empathy. If life could be this harsh/grueling/boring for someone who’d had all the advantages, what must it be like for someone who hadn’t? A thread of connection went out between me and everyone else. They, too, wanted to be happy. They, too, wanted to succeed. Maybe they had people they loved at home. They, too, were doing some weird uninteresting job in order to ensure the security and happiness of those beloved people of theirs, and yet…”

“The best thing that ever happened to me is that nothing happened in writing. I ended up working for engineering companies, and that’s where I found my material, in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace. Being broke and tired, you don’t come home your best self.

“I think fiction isn’t so good at being for or against things in general—the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.”

“If death is in the room, it’s pretty interesting. But I would also say that I’m interested in getting myself to believe that it’s going to happen to me. I’m interested in it, because if you’re not, you’re nuts. It’s really de facto what we’re here to find out about.”

“The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn’t damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.”

“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.”

“More and more these days what I find myself doing in my stories is making a representation of goodness and a representation of evil and then having those two run at each other full-speed, like a couple of PeeWee football players, to see what happens. Who stays standing? Whose helmet goes flying off?”

“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.”

“Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.”

“It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed to know to answer all the questions of the universe. Wouldn’t that be freaky? Whereas the probability is high that there is a vast reality that we have no way to perceive, that’s actually bearing down on us now and influencing everything.”

“There’s a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him—or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn’t have anything to do with his ego or his desire to ‘be a good writer.'”

“So, for me, the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed, crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously, it starts to accrete meanings as you go. And those meanings tend to be a little more emotional, a little more intense than the ones that you plan in advance. So it’s kind of an elaborate exercise in being comfortable with an element of mystery or sort of an unknown quality.”

“But I love the idea that more people would read short fiction. I think it’s such a humanizing form. It softens the boundaries between people. And I think, in our time, where, you know, so much of the information we get is sort of pre-polarized, fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions, in our neurology and our desires and our fears.”

“The universal human laws—need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain—are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.”

“I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he’s made of sugar.”

“For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that’s become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader’s ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.”

“The scariest thought in the world is that someday I’ll wake up and realize I’ve been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual.”

“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.”

“We have that illusion that we are ‘deciding’ what to make a character do, in order to ‘convey our message’ or something like that. But, at least in my experience, you are often more like a river-rafting guide who’s been paid a bonus to purposely steer your clients into the roughest possible water.”

“The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim.”

“Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they’re being written. Or at least they do for me. They’re the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.”