George Saunders Quotes

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.

I love the powerful woman who's complicated. There's no push to be one thing or another thing. It's all human. That's what you look for as an actor: characters written and portrayed in the most human way possible.

I never base a character on someone I know. You can get ideas from real life, but every character you write is some aspect of yourself.

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

I want my fiction to feel real most of the time, so it makes sense to pay attention to life and to how people work.

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

I come here not as a polished politician but as a woman who has had her fair share of life's knocks.

Hopefully, any character I play has an anchor in reality.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

I like to go out there looking like a strong woman, because I am strong. But I am also a woman who goes through all kinds of problems and highs and lows.

With each character in a movie, I'm looking for a human being. I'm looking for a person. And to me, I'm looking for a person that's full of strengths and weaknesses, a person that's full of successes and failures, a person that's full of joy and sorrow. I'm interested in people that are human beings that are alive.

I like to bring a level of vulnerability and real humanity to the characters I play when appropriate, and I feel like Dr. Culber lives pretty comfortably in that vulnerable world, but he's a professional first.

I let characters be human and flawed and relatable.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

When you're writing a story or an actor playing a role, you should never think of your characters as heroes or villains. You have to think of them as people first.

I think if you want to make a good sports movie, you've got to cut down on the sports. You have to make it about people. You can't try to impress people with your knowledge and the X and O's and all the details and the technicalities.

One piece of advice I have is: Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldn’t rely on it, because it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent and it’s not sufficient. So work hard, fall in love with the writing — the characters, the story, the words, the themes — and make sure that you are who you are regardless of your life circumstances. That way, when the good things come, they don’t warp you, and when the bad things hit you, you don’t fall apart.

The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.

Comedy and drama are different sides of the same coin. And the thing about comedy and drama is about likability. It's about character first. It's about story. And for me, it's about empathy, and I think the realer someone is, the further you can go either way with them.

I hear people talk in my head and I write it down. I choose where they live and how they dress to be real. That person wouldn't wear that. That person wouldn't say that. She can't afford to live like that. All that bullshit that so many movies have in them. I don't want to see that.

If I made an album just to sell you a story about how I'm the man, it really doesn't show any human side to me. It's good to talk about what's real and what's relevant.

I try to find something in everyone that I play - even the most heinous ones. You have to find something that is real and vulnerable about everything that you play.

And so we polish our own lives, creating landscapes and canyons and peaks with the very silt we try to avoid, the dirt we disavow or hide or deny. It is the dirt of our lives—the depressions, the losses, the inequities, the failing grades in trigonometry, the e-mails sent in fear or hate or haste, the ways in which we encounter people different from us—that shape us, polish us to a heady sheen, make us in fact more beautiful, more elemental, more artful and lasting.

You can write a whole fiction, and you're talking to people who have gone through that, in real life. But the truth of it is that when you're talking to those people, you don't care about your movie anymore. You just want to hear about what they have gone through. You want all of the details. It's amazing.

I think one of the hardest things to do in film or TV is to make something feel real, which is weird because it's about being a person, and life is something that everyone making films and TV can relate to.