Quotes from Andrew Sean Greer

I never wanted to be a scientist.

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.'

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.

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

Science fiction writers, when I was a kid, were a big deal.

I don't read literary blogs. I used to read them, but it was upsetting when they would talk, in a snarky way, about my friends.

I would write these novels about bullies in school: 'The Bullies: a Novel.'

I was good in biology, but I did very badly in chemistry, and my parents were horrified by that.

Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.

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

When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier, she seems to fade beside my mother.

You can look at my books and not find particular joy on every page because, of course, what you want to write about is the difficulty of the human experience. You don't want to lie about things to make happy endings and weddings if they don't deserve to happen. But I would be lying if I didn't try to communicate some of the pleasure of being alive.

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

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

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.

An elephant funeral makes me weep every time, and so does an ad with a kid leaving home for college.

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.

Any gay man in America redeals a deck at some point.

He kisses—how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you. There are some men who have never been kissed like that. There are some men who discover, after Arthur Less, that they never will be again.

Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young." "Yes! It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.

Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.

A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.

By the end, Arthur Less is in tears, sobbing in his seat, and he thinks he has been sobbing quietly until the lights come up and the woman seated beside him turns and says, "Honey, I don't know what happened in your life, but I am so so sorry," and gives him a lilac-scented embrace. Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I'm just a homosexual at a Broadway show.

New York is a city of eight million people, approximately seven million of whom will be furious when they hear you were in town and didn't meet them for an expensive dinner, five million furious you didn't visit their new baby, three million furious you didn't see their new show, one million furious you didn't call for sex, but only five actually available to meet you. It is completely reasonable to call none of them.