George Saunders Quotes

I find it inspiring and I always think when I'm working on something new, whether it's a new kind of character or a new kind of story or new kind of camera, it gets my creative wheels spinning.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.

It's really an interesting problem, trying to earn a living and serve art and serve kids. What I try to create are these visual layers so that readers feel the possibility exists that there might be something in the book they never saw before.

I don't make judgments about my own work, and I don't analyze it; I just let it happen. That applies to everything I've done.

My creative juices flow seasonally.

Even though people think I am more of a conceptual artist, I am actually very intuitive. For me, it is still a matter of allowing things to naturally rise to the top of my mental pile, and then I make them.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.

Any carefully planned thing destroys the creativity. You can't think your way through a story; you have to live it. So, you don't build a story; you allow it to explode.

When I write a story, it's not like I'm thinking about what I'm doing

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

I try to think of the songs as little movies. They're always pretty visual to me. I can always sort of see them. I don't always know what the end result is going to be, and I don't know exactly what it's going to sound like, but I can kinda see them.

Storytelling wasn't about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.

I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground.

My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don’t expect to go. That’s what happens when you write stories. You listen and you say ‘a ha,’ and you write it down. A lot of it is not planned, not conscious; it happens while you’re doing it. You know more about it after you’re done.

I think once everything is in place, once you've kind of wrapped your head around the story and the character, it's very liberating and you can start doing things like you would do.

I have no imagination; I just steal from life and change the color. Then it's a comic book.

Stories have a richness that goes way beyond fact. My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don't expect to go.

Art is a little bit larger than life - it's an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.

Everyone has a story, the air is full of stories. The creative process is mysterious, I don't know why it is that suddenly a theme will take hold of me and refuse to leave me in peace until I investigate it and write it.