If you start with the idea that you are going to be writing about a night in a graveyard, and that there are only a few living people in that frame, all sorts of interesting and difficult technical problems arise. And then form - new form, or experimental form - might be understood as just trying to tell that story most movingly and efficiently.
George SaundersIf I can be more efficient, I'm actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.
George SaundersI think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil." I think even like Saddam Hussein or Hitler would wake up and say, "I think it's going to be a good day. I'm gonna do some really important work." And given their definition of good, they went out and did horrible things.
George SaundersI watched a bunch of kids movies on Christmas. I was kind of joking with our family by asking, "Is anyone allowed to die in a kid's movie anymore?"
George SaundersMy stories, I can understand them as a little toy that you wind up and you put it on the floor and it just goes under the coach. That I get. Beyond that, I'm a little lost.
George SaundersI live up in the hills, and I don't have any cable, and I have really slow satellite, so that does it - because being on the Internet is okay, but it takes a long time. I have a prediction that at some point, there will be a backlash. Like at the end of the '60s, there was that back-to-the-land movement, and I'm guessing that people will start consciously saying, "I'm not taking the phone with me," or "I'm only checking email x number of times a day," or "I'm not ever gonna self-Google," for example.
George Saunders