The greatest thing about writing a book is that at first it's all inchoate, but the more you work on it, the more the book teaches you its internal rules.
George SaundersThe one thing about A Christmas Carol that always bothers me is that Cratchit is so sweet and perfect. He's like an Ivy League kid who just is labeled "poor." He doesn't have any bad habits. He's never cranky with his kids.
George SaundersNothing will turn you into a Civil War buff like five years of reading. Some of the letters that people wrote from that time are so deep and so beautifully articulate. And you realize, especially with the stuff that's going on now in America, that it's always been chaos - people were disagreeing at least as much as they are now and 20,000 people would die in a day. It's the scale that's amazing, and also the proximity to our own time.
George SaundersI think the biggest single issue is income inequity and what this is doing to the good old "American dream." This and corporatism - this delusional idea that "shareholder value" outweighs everything else.
George Saunders