Andrew Sean Greer Quotes
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'The Story Of A Marriage' was initially a short story I wrote, and before that, it was a family story. It was a story that a relative of mine told me about herself in the '50s, and it was a story that no one else in my family believes, and it might not be true.
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I have come to this conclusion: if 'sentimentality' is lazy emotion, then the term itself is lazy criticism.
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It's hard to tell if I've had writer's block because it seems to me that it's when nothing comes, but, you know, every day you stare at that computer screen, and I think, 'It's never going to happen today. How can I write three pages?' And the hours pass, and they haven't shown up, and then at the very end it always happens, so it's willpower.
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My mother taught me to ask people about the things they love.
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You write three pages over six hours, and you don't feel like you've gotten anywhere, but if you've done a beautiful metaphor or a lovely sentence, or you finally got to some moment you wanted, then that's worth it. Then you can close your computer and get a little relief.
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A downside to being a successful novelist? Wow - I can't imagine one.
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With each book, I'm trying to do something that terrifies me.
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My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Poppy, had us each write a 'novel,' whatever that meant to us. It must have been 10 pages long, and we bound it and colored the front. And she wrote on mine, 'I can't wait till your real novel comes out. Give me a call.'
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To distract myself from writing, I was singing Bob Dylan's 'My Back Pages.' You know, 'I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.' I thought, 'I should write a character like that.'
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Human love and desire is my bag.
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I don't read literary blogs. I used to read them, but it was upsetting when they would talk, in a snarky way, about my friends.
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Science fiction writers, when I was a kid, were a big deal.
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Both my parents were atheists, and my grandmother was an atheist in rural Kentucky, and so they were trying to make sure that my brother and I would be atheists, too, and it worked, which doesn't mean that they didn't teach us a lot of wonder of science and of nature and the world and all of that.
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I never wanted to be a scientist.
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There's a certain point in chemistry and in calculus where I reached the end of my abilities, and I realized, 'This is where I'm stupid.'
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My grandmother was not a great storyteller.
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Travel is hard, and it's mostly not your fault.
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Every writer is an outsider.
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Other writers know what you're going through, what you're talking about when you write.
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Usually on Sundays, I won't cook because I'll have dinner at my mom's. She's the provost of Mills College in Oakland and lives on campus. It's a very beautiful school in a very bad part of town.
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They say you hit your stride as a writer at about 50. I'm hoping to do that.
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Definitely for writing, what inspires me is poetry, which I have next to me all the time because I think they're doing what I'm doing, but much harder, more condensed. It's the same job, but they're more talented. All of them. So I just steal openly from them.
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I think I'm a terrible researcher. I find it very boring and frustrating, but the things you can find are better than what I could imagine. And when you find them, it's wonderful, and they don't feel artificial.
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My own accumulation of influences is actually what made me a writer in the first place.