Andrew Sean Greer Quotes
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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 don't think I'm a gay activist. I used to be.
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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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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 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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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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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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I'm not despairing of love at all.
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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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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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'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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An elephant funeral makes me weep every time, and so does an ad with a kid leaving home for college.
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Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.
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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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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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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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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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I would write these novels about bullies in school: 'The Bullies: a Novel.'
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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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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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I was good in biology, but I did very badly in chemistry, and my parents were horrified by that.
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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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Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'