George Saunders Quotes

I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.

I think kids are excited by language, and they're not always given credit for that.

Part of my job as Children's Laureate is to visit schools and talk about my love of books and stories and encourage them all to do it as well - to read, to write, to never be afraid of their own voice. Because we all have something to say.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

Read a lot. Read broadly... Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored... Write a lot.

May books spread the world over!

Read everything! I believe that reading made me a writer.

To write, I think it is very important to read. The more you read, the more you know the techniques of writing.

Some people read. I like to put words together.

I have always, always loved words.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

Letter writing is an excellent way of slowing down this lunatic helterskelter universe long enough to gather one’s thoughts

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.

To be a writer you should read, write and talk to people, hear their knowledge, hear their problems. Be a good listener. The rest will come.

Creative writing and literacy go hand and hand.

Writing, or at least good writing, is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people. And that's true whether you're reading Shakespeare or bad vampire fiction-reading is always an act of empathy. It's always an imagining of what it's like to be someone else.

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.

This is what I love about novels - both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.

I like to read fiction best and I like to write fiction, too.

Writing is so hard. Why would you be a writer if you weren't really good at it? If you could be anything else, why would you be a writer?

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

You really can’t write unless you read. You have to know what the game is all about.

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.