Andrew Sean Greer Quotes
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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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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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My grandmother wore a beehive hairdo even when it was out of fashion.
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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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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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Any gay man in America redeals a deck at some point.
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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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Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.
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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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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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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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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 would write these novels about bullies in school: 'The Bullies: a Novel.'
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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 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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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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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.
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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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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 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 was good in biology, but I did very badly in chemistry, and my parents were horrified by that.
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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.