Words matter. These are the best Jesse Andrews Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I think screenwriting gave me more of an affinity for plot – my first novel, ‘Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,’ doesn’t have a very sophisticated roadmap. But screenwriting required me to learn a higher level of plottiness, and I tried to bring that to ‘The Haters.’
In a way, there’s nothing new under the sun, so anything you write about has been written about by other people. All you can do is bring yourself to it, bring as much honesty as you can to it.
I don’t think you can write from a reactive place. I think you just write the thing you want to write about, and if other people are writing about it, that doesn’t really come to bear on what you want to do.
My first drafts are always terrible, and I hate them, but the process for me is all about writing the bad version until it tells you what the good version is. And then you write that.
As a teenager, I was undeveloped and out of touch. The arts was another arena in which to do combat and challenge myself. I read difficult books like James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ but I didn’t really understand it, and no one was going to call me on it because I was 16.
You show up at high school, there’s all these kids you don’t know, and you’re terrified that people will have some kind of wrong or unpleasant impression of you. You just don’t want anything to ruin your public persona, because you actually have a public persona in high school.
Writing is more important than being a writer.
‘The Haters’ has some of the generalities of band experiences that I’ve had – the camaraderie, the grubbiness, the outsized collective ambitions and frequent painful collisions with reality – but very few of the specifics. I guess it was a way for me to take some of my experiences to their logical crazy extremes.
I fought tooth and nail: I didn’t want to learn Hebrew. My Bar Mitzvah came around, and I didn’t want to read the Torah portion. I look back with a lot of chagrin about how I behaved.
Young adult fiction is getting more popular among adults because the writer is trying hard all the time to maintain the reader’s interest.
If something is being written about a lot, there’s a conversation there; there’s a dialogue there. There’s probably a reason for it that it resonates deeply in some way.
Young adults are honest readers. They won’t stay with a book unless they have a reason, so it has to move along.
I watched a ton of films growing up, but in a haphazard way. There was nothing scholarly or focused about it.
You want a storybook kind of closure with someone when they die, but I think that kind of thing is impossible.
I liked art history. Also liked the gender ratio, especially compared to applied math and physics.
‘Munmun’ happened because the human world’s dizzying inequality – of wealth and of power – had begun to send me over the edge, and I had to write something to try to help myself understand it a little better.
It wasn’t until I got to college and had a lot of my ego beaten out of me… That’s when I started to turn to literature as something deeper than a way to put up points.
As a teenager, I didn’t read a ton of teen fiction, and now I feel like I wish that I had.
Everyone’s got this hidden infinity that you only get glimpses of. They’re always more complex than your conception of them will allow.
Hebrew School was my first introduction to real feminism. I remember that much more than I remember any kind of actual religious teaching.
I’m influenced by Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace: writers who are often not content to just stack paragraphs and have to break out of that.
I started playing music around 13 or 14, played jazz in high school, and played other stuff in college. After college, I tried to make it as a musician. I lived in a big squalid house full of dudes outside of Boston. We were all musicians. We built this studio in the basement and played there all hours of the day.
