George Saunders

We humans tend to reduce.  We live through a great day, full of literally millions of perceptual instants (a beach, a love affair, a really weird old couple who mysteriously keep saying incredibly insightful things while picking off of one another bugs that aren’t there; a stream, a snake under a faded sail, etc, etc.), and at the end that day, we go: “Wow, that was awesome.”  Art is the inversion of that process: paying hyper-attention to the things that make reality what it is, resisting reduction, trusting that the truest (and most beautiful) thing that can be said has something to do with the accretion of those small instants.

- George Saunders interviewed by Gary Percesepe (from BLIP Magazine)