-
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.
Andrew Sean Greer -
My grandmother wore a beehive hairdo even when it was out of fashion.
Andrew Sean Greer
-
'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.
Andrew Sean Greer -
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.
Andrew Sean Greer -
I'm not despairing of love at all.
Andrew Sean Greer -
An elephant funeral makes me weep every time, and so does an ad with a kid leaving home for college.
Andrew Sean Greer -
Other writers know what you're going through, what you're talking about when you write.
Andrew Sean Greer -
I have come to this conclusion: if 'sentimentality' is lazy emotion, then the term itself is lazy criticism.
Andrew Sean Greer
-
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.
Andrew Sean Greer -
I would write these novels about bullies in school: 'The Bullies: a Novel.'
Andrew Sean Greer -
Some books inspire one to read, and some inspire one to write; for selfish reasons, I'm always looking for the latter.
Andrew Sean Greer -
I was good in biology, but I did very badly in chemistry, and my parents were horrified by that.
Andrew Sean Greer -
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.
Andrew Sean Greer -
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.
Andrew Sean Greer
-
I never wanted to be a scientist.
Andrew Sean Greer -
Travel is hard, and it's mostly not your fault.
Andrew Sean Greer -
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.
Andrew Sean Greer -
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.
Andrew Sean Greer -
Any gay man in America redeals a deck at some point.
Andrew Sean Greer -
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.
Andrew Sean Greer
-
There must be times when people look in the mirror and they realize they're 60.
Andrew Sean Greer -
I think, like, fiction has a place to understand those things that are hardest to understand that non-fiction can't ever get at.
Andrew Sean Greer -
Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'
Andrew Sean Greer -
I heard you had to get 200 rejections before you got published.
Andrew Sean Greer