All GEORGE SAUNDERS Quotes about “Writing”

“Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.”
“I'm always aware of writing around things I can't do, and I've come to think that that's actually what 'style' is - an avoidance of your deficiencies.”
“I used to joke about this but I've recently realized that I really believe it: I spent many years training myself to write very slowly for pretty good money. So the idea of writing really quickly for free offends me.”
“Even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good place to play with that thing and to begin to really see it.”
“When I write I know that I'm going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need.”
“My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period and what you're really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces - trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work.”
“The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.”
“I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.”
“If you start with the idea that you are going to be writing about a night in a graveyard, and that there are only a few living people in that frame, all sorts of interesting and difficult technical problems arise. And then form - new form, or experimental form - might be understood as just trying to tell that story most movingly and efficiently.”
“I think that feels like it to me. I mean whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.”

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