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I feel like artists, as much as we'd like to think we're communal, are pretty much loners.
Andrew Sean Greer -
I grew up in the suburbs, which I don't think shaped me very much.
Andrew Sean Greer
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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.
Andrew Sean Greer -
Critics, how I would love if you could clear the word 'sentimental' from your minds.
Andrew Sean Greer -
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.
Andrew Sean Greer -
I had never heard of 'young adult novels,' which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something.
Andrew Sean Greer -
My mom is an experimental chemist and physicist, so she is a cut-and-dried, nuts-and-bolts kind of woman, and my dad is a theoretical chemist, so we were definitely raised with his philosophical point of view: imaginary numbers and dimensions beyond our own. That's the kind of thing we would talk about.
Andrew Sean Greer -
I think it would be bad to a truly successful celebrity person, because I know these novelists where people get a cult following, and they have some strange personal attachment to them because it's so personal to read a book.
Andrew Sean Greer
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Can you call and thank reviewers? I always wondered that.
Andrew Sean Greer -
A lot of problems get solved in those sort of in-between moments when your subconscious has been working on some problem. If you keep it spinning, you can fix ideas sometimes better than if you focus on them directly.
Andrew Sean Greer -
I wake up at 10. I have coffee, and then I spend a half an hour on the computer, where I read newspapers and progressive blogs. I have to tear myself away, or I'll spend all day reading.
Andrew Sean Greer -
They had a contest where they would - for some reason, someone in the past loved musical theater, and so if you wrote a musical, they would fully fund it and put it on the main stage with full costumes and a set and everything, and my roommate said we should totally do that.
Andrew Sean Greer -
I hadn't meant to do the pattern of publishing short stories and then a novel. I thought, 'I'm a novelist. I know it.' But you have to kind of write a lot of bad novels before you can write a good one, I think, so I did that. But meanwhile, I loved the short stories I did.
Andrew Sean Greer -
I think screenplay is hard. I've tried that, and it felt really difficult; like, all the stuff I think I'm good at, like description and internal experience and memory, you can't do that - or, at least, I couldn't figure out a way.
Andrew Sean Greer