"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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George Saunders quote about sympathy: "I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleav..."

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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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"I have the greatest sympathy with the growth of the socialist party. I think they understand the evils that surround us and hammer them into people's minds better than we Liberals."

-Charles Trevelyan

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"Captain Hale, alone, without sympathy or support, save that from above, on the near approach of death asked for a clergyman to attend him. It was refused. He then requested a Bible that too was refused by his inhuman jailer."

-William Hull

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"I didn't feel any remorse or sympathy if I injured a rival. I went over the top a few times but I never broke anyone's leg."

-Peter Storey

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"It is the right of our people to organize to oppose any law and any part of the Constitution with which they are not in sympathy."

-Alfred E. Smith

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"There's a certain amount of sympathy here for the Bush administration's problem, which is they would like to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they would like to have the Kurds autonomous."

-Les Aspin

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"Teetotallers lack the sympathy and generosity of men that drink."

-W. H. Davies

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