So I suppose one danger is that we might get the idea that, you know, “to blurt, is to be.” The idea that whatever comes out is good and is us. Whereas someone who has really worked with text realizes — well, that neither one is “really” you, but that the considered version might represent a “higher” you — brighter, less willing to coast or condescend, funnier, and (mysteriously) also, I think, kinder. George Saunders
Writing is a struggle against silence.
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Carlos Fuentes
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.
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Walter Benjamin
People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things and brings opposites together. Grammar is a wonderful way of organising...
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Delphine De Vigan
In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things....
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Madeleine LEngle
For most of the process, nothing but faith, fueled by your own stubbornness, will be pulling you along. The work that you've done on the book so far won't be much comfort, because so much of it will be insufferable crap, until the very last...
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Kristin Cashore
More Quotes By George Saunders
Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.
Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.
I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of...
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...
It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.
