All GEORGE SAUNDERS Quotes about “Books”

“[Lincoln in the Bardo] is not a long book. And that meant I could obsess over it and live in it both backwards and forwards and hyper-control everything.”
“I knew if I evoked that stuff too easily or gratuitously, as a way of assuaging my fears of not being edgy or whatever, the writing would fall apart. This book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was going to have to have some earnestness in it.”
“[In the moment of reading writer and reader] are both briefly their best selves, or at least better selves. A flawed human being writes something and 60 years later a reader picks up the book and something in them rises to meet it.”
“And I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it - which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course.”
“The beginning [of Lincoln in the Bardo] is strange, and I did a lot of work calibrating that so that a reader with a certain level of patience would get through it and in the nick of time start to figure out what was going on. In a short book, you can do that.”
“There are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven't died yet.”
“The greatest thing about writing a book is that at first it's all inchoate, but the more you work on it, the more the book teaches you its internal rules.”
“If I'm writing a story and you're reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process.”
“I sometimes think that I can't do the bigger thing that [Zadie Smith] do so beautifully, as in Swing Time, with so much world in it and so much rapturous paint thrown around. I don't think it would be possible to write a book on that scale with as much OCD as I have.”
“There are some things fundamentally off about the stance of the book. And maybe that's okay; maybe every book is flawed, and great books, as flawed as they might be, articulate a moral argument that the reader then carries forward. The critique to this model is, of course, to ask: Should a book be ever so perfect that you come out of it with complete moral agreement that can be sustained?”
“You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.”
“I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.”
“There were several points where I would kind of turn to the book and say, "Get thee behind me." I don't think real novelists do that. But I make a distinction between prose that's very efficiency-minded (like, the minimum I can get away with), versus loosening the screws and letting the words spill out beautifully and so on.”
“One of the ideas that runs through this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] is this Buddhist notion that the mind is incredibly powerful; not the brain but the mind.”
“That underscored this idea that when we're reading a book or writing a book, you're in an act of co-creation. The reader and the writer are both trying to dress up and present their best selves and then there's that moment, when suddenly, as a reader, you're not exactly you anymore, and likewise, as a writer, you're not really you.”
“I'm not a big fan of my books going on cross-country road trips. They get arrogant and, next thing, start aspiring to become 'large-print' books. I say, let them stay home and be regular small-print books.”
“It blew my mind, reading Swing Time, that I could take any sentence in the book, and it was one of the most beautiful sentences written in English.”
“I would say one thing writing this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] did for me was underscore the fact that this issue [all men are created equal] has never been properly addressed and it hasn't gone away.”
“If I'm writing a story and you're reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process. And how does that happen? Well, it happens when I know more than you do, and when I know that I know more than you do, and I'm holding it back from you. So that I can then manipulate you at the end. You know, you think about like in a dating situation how terrible that would be, it's the same thing with a book.”
“As the writer of this book [Lincoln in the Bardo], what I loved was the feeling of having so many surprises come at the end that I hadn't really planned or planted.”
“What was fun for me with this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was to start out with the principle that went, "We're going to fight every day to make this not a novel; make it too short to be a novel." And then with that principle in place, the book sort of starts to say, "Okay, but I really need this. I really need some historical nuggets." And you're like, "All right, but keep it under control."”
“I don't know about transformation. But scientifically you can say: Well, it doesn't seem to hurt anybody. Personally I've been cheered by books at really critical moments. That much I believe.”
“I'm not thinking in any big thematic or conceptual terms - especially in this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] when I was trying to make the voices more active, more energetic.”
“The book says [Lincoln in the Bardo],"I really need this sci-fi device of a ghost inhabiting another person." You say okay kind of begrudgingly. So the structure seemed informed by need and efficiency.”

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