A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.
George SaundersIt was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.
George SaundersSo here's something I know to be true, although it's a little corny, and I don't quite know what to do with it.
George SaundersBased on the experience of my life, which I have not exactly hit out of the park, I tend to agree with that thing about, If it's not broke, don't fix it. And would go even further to: Even if it is broke, leave it alone, you'll probably make it worse.
George SaundersWhenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.
George SaundersVonnegut's war was necessary. And yet it was massacre and screaming and confusion and blood and death. It was the mammoth projection outward of the confused inner life of men. In war, the sad tidy constructs we make to help us believe life is orderly and controllable are roughly thrown aside like the delusions they are. In war, love is outed as an insane, insupportable emotion, a kind of luxury emotion, because everywhere you look, someone beloved to someone is being slaughtered, by someone whose own beloved has been slaughtered, or will be, or could be.
George Saunders