Quotes from Andrew Sean Greer

Human love and desire is my bag.

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

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.

A downside to being a successful novelist? Wow - I can't imagine one.

Usually on Sundays, I won't cook because I'll have dinner at my mom's. She's the provost of Mills College in Oakland and lives on campus. It's a very beautiful school in a very bad part of town.

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.

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

Some books inspire one to read, and some inspire one to write; for selfish reasons, I'm always looking for the latter.

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 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.

It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.

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

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.

Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.

There must be times when people look in the mirror and they realize they're 60.

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.

During every book, I have a nervous breakdown. Usually it's about two thirds of the way through the book - I'm just comatose on the couch for at least a week, and I eventually break through it and have an answer about how to fix the thing.

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

Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'

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.

My grandmother was not a great storyteller.

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.

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

Every writer is an outsider.