Andrew Sean Greer Quotes
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I think, like, fiction has a place to understand those things that are hardest to understand that non-fiction can't ever get at.
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I don't think I'm a gay activist. I used to be.
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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 think what shaped me was I had two parents who were scientists, and especially, they were great readers. They had both grown up in sort of rural parts of the South and were oddballs where they grew up. They were budding intellectuals.
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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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My own accumulation of influences is actually what made me a writer in the first place.
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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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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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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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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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My grandmother wore a beehive hairdo even when it was out of fashion.
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Some people think of the '50s as a time of innocence, but they are misremembering it or reinventing it: if you look at the papers of the time, they are filled with dread and anxiety.
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Some books inspire one to read, and some inspire one to write; for selfish reasons, I'm always looking for the latter.
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I have to get three pages done every day, and there's usually a point about 150 pages in where everything falls apart, where all the plans are for naught. The book has become something else, and I have a nervous breakdown, and then I submit to what the book has become, and I keep going, and that's a terrible and then a great time.
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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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Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.
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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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Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'
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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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I had never heard of 'young adult novels,' which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something.
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I would write these novels about bullies in school: 'The Bullies: a Novel.'
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My mother is a southern lady with short dark hair and a wary, blue-eyed smile. She is also an experimental chemist and teaches a college course entitled The Chemistry of Cooking.
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For writers: don't hold back. Be weird. Be sentimental. Be melodramatic. Take the risk of being not-cool, not-hip.
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You can sort of start to write around 10. You also become a good reader around that time, and you want to imitate the thing that you love. I got praise for it, and then I found that it was a great way of translating my life, so I would write little stories and plays and things. At that point, it was kids' books that I was reading.