Top 30 Andrew Sean Greer Quotes

I heard you had to get 200 rejections before you got published.

‘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.

I was raised Unitarian, and my mother said she took us to church so that we wouldn’t get religious later in life.

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.’

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.

Critics, how I would love if you could clear the word ‘sentimental’ from your minds.

My country is nothing if not diverse.

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was, like, 10.

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 don’t think I’m a gay activist. I used to be.

My own accumulation of influences is actually what made me a writer in the first place.

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.

I had never heard of ‘young adult novels,’ which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something.

They say you hit your stride as a writer at about 50. I’m hoping to do that.

My mother taught me to ask people about the things they love.

Both my parents were atheists, and my grandmother was an atheist in rural Kentucky, and so they were trying to make sure that my brother and I would be atheists, too, and it worked, which doesn’t mean that they didn’t teach us a lot of wonder of science and of nature and the world and all of that.

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 grandmother was not a great storyteller.

I have come to this conclusion: if ‘sentimentality’ is lazy emotion, then the term itself is lazy criticism.

I think, like, fiction has a place to understand those things that are hardest to understand that non-fiction can’t ever get at.

A downside to being a successful novelist? Wow – I can’t imagine one.

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.

My grandmother wore a beehive hairdo even when it was out of fashion.

Human love and desire is my bag.

I feel like artists, as much as we’d like to think we’re communal, are pretty much loners.

For writers: don’t hold back. Be weird. Be sentimental. Be melodramatic. Take the risk of being not-cool, not-hip.

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.

Other writers know what you’re going through, what you’re talking about when you write.

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.

It’s funny how the present can change the past.