Daily: Read fiction to save democracy, with writer George Saunders

“I had the idea that literature was a beautiful gilded mansion and I had to leave all my real shit at the door. And it’s not true.”

“Our basic storytelling gland has to do with curiosity”

“My job as a writer is to get to a place where the world doesn’t surprise me.”

“A story isn’t a monolithic whole that comes from the writer’s moral qualities. It’s a magic trick made out of fragments of language.”

“When you’ve got an administration that rejects enlightenment values they’re not susceptible to satire. And I found that with Trump.”