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 hes made of sugar. – George Saunders
The scariest thought in the world is that someday Ill wake up and realize Ive been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual. – George Saunders
I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life Ive 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
Im finding, as I get older, that Im not much of a believer in redemption. I mean, I believe in redemption in real life – redemption does happen, and its cool when it does – but I find myself getting leery of my desire for it in stories (especially my own). – George Saunders
The way you want to respond is to ask a question: Is this technology directly relevant to our hedgehog concept? If the answer is YES, then we want to become pioneers, not in the technology, but in the application of that technology specifically linked to our hedgehog concept. – James Collins