Andrew Sean Greer Quotes
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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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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.
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I feel like artists, as much as we'd like to think we're communal, are pretty much loners.
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Critics, how I would love if you could clear the word 'sentimental' from your minds.
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I heard you had to get 200 rejections before you got published.
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There must be times when people look in the mirror and they realize they're 60.
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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.
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I grew up in the suburbs, which I don't think shaped me very much.
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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.
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Can you call and thank reviewers? I always wondered that.
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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.
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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.
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I've wanted to be a writer since I was, like, 10.
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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.
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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.
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It's funny how the present can change the past.
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My country is nothing if not diverse.