"The universal human laws - need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.“

-George Saunders

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George Saunders quote about fear: "The universal human laws - need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindne..."

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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 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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"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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"There's no love more intense than the love we have for our kids - and where there is intense love, there is also intense fear lurking beneath the surface."

-Arianna Huffington

"You don't have to do everything by the time you're 30. Or 40. All you need is a work ethic. It's what allows you to push through moments of disappointment and self-doubt and fear."

-Candace Bushnell

"I think interviews can be fine. It's just there's this terrible fear of coming off wrongly or saying something that gets taken out of context."

-Nicholas Hoult

"Don't fear anything for your letters, they are burnt one by one and I hope you do the same with mine."

-Camille Claudel

"I think, however, that so long as our present economic and national systems continue, scientific research has little to fear."

-John B. S. Haldane

"Greatness comes from fear. Fear can either shut us down and we go home, or we fight through it."

-Lionel Richie