I loved Monty Python for the wordplay--this sense that you didn’t have to squash your intelligence to be funny. In fact, you could walk right into your intelligence and neediness and self-doubt, and that could be funny.

— George Saunders

In a culture that is becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he donates a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library of Congress, that 'Coca-Cola has become an integral part of people's lives by helping to tell these stories,' it is perhaps not surprising that people have trouble teaching and receiving a novel as complex and flawed as Huck Finn, but it is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us.

— George Saunders

In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe.

— George Saunders

In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a “dove” and a “hawk,” say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus starting with the same basic facts (even if those facts were questionable, limited, or erroneous). Now each of us constructs a custom informational universe, wittingly (we choose to go to the sources that uphold our existing beliefs and thus flatter us) or unwittingly (our app algorithms do the driving for us). The data we get this way, pre-imprinted with spin and mythos, are intensely one-dimensional.

— George Saunders

Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.

— George Saunders

I say it must have been great to grow up when men were men. He says men have always been what they are now, namely incapable of coping with life without the intervention of God the Almighty. Then in the oven behind him my pizza starts smoking, and he says case in point.

— George Saunders

Is this the baby?" I said. Ma turned on me again." What do you think it is?" she said. "A midget that can't talk?

— George Saunders

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.

— George Saunders

It is soon to be spring The Christmas toys barely played with I have a glass soldier whose head can turn The palettes interchangeable Soon flowers will bloom Lawrence from the garden shed will give us each a cup of seeds I am to wait I said

— George Saunders

I took me to the Banks of the River, and tarried there awhile, as the lowering Sun made one with the Water, giving generously of Itself & its Diverse Colors, in a Splay of Magnificence that preceded a most wonderful Silence.

— George Saunders