Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.

The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.