There was one sequence of days [making Lincoln in the Bardo] when I had halfway decided to use the historical nuggets, but I wasn't quite sure it would work. I'd be in my room for six or seven hours, cutting up bits of paper with quotes and arranging them on the floor, with this little voice in my head saying, "Hey, this isn't writing!" But at the end of that day, I felt that the resulting section was doing important emotional work
George SaundersArt is not some inessential frippery - it is the nation's means of intelligently regarding itself. To cripple or stigmatize the arts is to doom one's nation to a life of incuriosity, dullness, literalness and the worst kind of rank materialism.
George SaundersEven the written history [of Abraham Lincoln's times] is poorly understood by most people.
George SaundersThere's this de facto assumption that for something to have value, it has to be economically self-supporting - which imposes a very low ceiling on a culture.
George Saunders