"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
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"Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.“
-George Saunders
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"I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society."
-George Saunders
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"I turned 54 this year and I find myself feeling like I'm in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life - or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations."
-George Saunders
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"If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too."
-George Saunders
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"Whatever your supposed politics are - left, right - if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to the occasion and feel the human pain in a way that they might not if it was presented in a more conceptual way."
-George Saunders
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"A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did."
-George Saunders
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Same Category
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"The truth is in California you can't build a new manufacturing facility, and businesses are leaving in droves because of bad government policy."
-Carly Fiorina
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"I agree with just about everyone in the reform debate when they say 'If you like what you have, you should be able to keep it.' But the truth is that none of the health reform bills making their way through Congress actually delivers on that promise."
-Ron Wyden
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"The GAO just released a report that said 22 percent of federal programs fail to meet their objectives. The truth is we don't know how taxpayer money is spent in Washington, D.C., which is why I think we ought to put every agency budget up on the Internet for everyone to see."
-Carly Fiorina
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"Tell the truth, work hard, and come to dinner on time."
-Gerald R. Ford
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"I intend to explode the myths about myself and get down to the real truth about the legend that is Batman."
-Bob Kane
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"The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature."
-Lewis Thomas
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