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
'The Story Of A Marriage' was initially a short story I wrote, and before that, it was a family story. It was a story that a relative of mine told me about herself in the '50s, and it was a story that no one else in my family believes, and it might not be true.
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.
To distract myself from writing, I was singing Bob Dylan's 'My Back Pages.' You know, 'I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.' I thought, 'I should write a character like that.'
I feel like artists, as much as we'd like to think we're communal, are pretty much loners.
My grandmother wore a beehive hairdo even when it was out of fashion.
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.
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.
I had never heard of 'young adult novels,' which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something.
My own accumulation of influences is actually what made me a writer in the first place.
My mother taught me to ask people about the things they love.
Critics, how I would love if you could clear the word 'sentimental' from your minds.
I think, like, fiction has a place to understand those things that are hardest to understand that non-fiction can't ever get at.
It's hard to tell if I've had writer's block because it seems to me that it's when nothing comes, but, you know, every day you stare at that computer screen, and I think, 'It's never going to happen today. How can I write three pages?' And the hours pass, and they haven't shown up, and then at the very end it always happens, so it's willpower.
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.
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.
A downside to being a successful novelist? Wow - I can't imagine one.
I've wanted to be a writer since I was, like, 10.
It's funny how the present can change the past.
My country is nothing if not diverse.
Other writers know what you're going through, what you're talking about when you write.
There must be times when people look in the mirror and they realize they're 60.
'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.
There's a certain point in chemistry and in calculus where I reached the end of my abilities, and I realized, 'This is where I'm stupid.'
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.
I'm not despairing of love at all.
I would write these novels about bullies in school: 'The Bullies: a Novel.'
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.
For writers: don't hold back. Be weird. Be sentimental. Be melodramatic. Take the risk of being not-cool, not-hip.
I don't think I'm a gay activist. I used to be.
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.
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.
I never wanted to be a scientist.
Can you call and thank reviewers? I always wondered that.
Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.
With each book, I'm trying to do something that terrifies me.
My grandmother was not a great storyteller.
Every writer is an outsider.
They say you hit your stride as a writer at about 50. I'm hoping to do that.
Some books inspire one to read, and some inspire one to write; for selfish reasons, I'm always looking for the latter.
I was good in biology, but I did very badly in chemistry, and my parents were horrified by that.
My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Poppy, had us each write a 'novel,' whatever that meant to us. It must have been 10 pages long, and we bound it and colored the front. And she wrote on mine, 'I can't wait till your real novel comes out. Give me a call.'
I heard you had to get 200 rejections before you got published.
Any gay man in America redeals a deck at some point.
I have come to this conclusion: if 'sentimentality' is lazy emotion, then the term itself is lazy criticism.
An elephant funeral makes me weep every time, and so does an ad with a kid leaving home for college.
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.
Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'
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.
Science fiction writers, when I was a kid, were a big deal.
