Andrew Sean Greer Quotes
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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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A downside to being a successful novelist? Wow - I can't imagine one.
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Human love and desire is my bag.
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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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They say you hit your stride as a writer at about 50. I'm hoping to do that.
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You can look at my books and not find particular joy on every page because, of course, what you want to write about is the difficulty of the human experience. You don't want to lie about things to make happy endings and weddings if they don't deserve to happen. But I would be lying if I didn't try to communicate some of the pleasure of being alive.
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I was raised Unitarian, and my mother said she took us to church so that we wouldn't get religious later in life.
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My own accumulation of influences is actually what made me a writer in the first place.
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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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I do think that Americans do not understand that things are done differently in other parts of the world and that the other ways people do things are equally accurate ways to do things. Someone else just came up with something different.
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My grandmother wore a beehive hairdo even when it was out of fashion.
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During every book, I have a nervous breakdown. Usually it's about two thirds of the way through the book - I'm just comatose on the couch for at least a week, and I eventually break through it and have an answer about how to fix the thing.
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'A High Wind in Jamaica' is like those books you used to read under the covers with a flashlight - only infinitely more delicious... and macabre.
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To say 'A High Wind in Jamaica' is a novel about children who are abducted by pirates is to make it seem like a children's book. But that's completely wrong; its theme is actually how heartless children are.
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Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.
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With each book, I'm trying to do something that terrifies me.
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I'm not despairing of love at all.
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Every writer is an outsider.
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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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I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do but either walk around or read a book or work on your book, and they all seem helpful.
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An elephant funeral makes me weep every time, and so does an ad with a kid leaving home for college.
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My mother taught me to ask people about the things they love.
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I would write these novels about bullies in school: 'The Bullies: a Novel.'
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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.