Andrew Sean Greer

“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.”

“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 wake up at 10. I have coffee, and then I spend a half an hour on the computer, where I read newspapers and progressive blogs. I have to tear myself away, or I'll spend all day reading.”

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

“How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.”

“My grandmother was not a great storyteller.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“You write three pages over six hours, and you don't feel like you've gotten anywhere, but if you've done a beautiful metaphor or a lovely sentence, or you finally got to some moment you wanted, then that's worth it. Then you can close your computer and get a little relief.”

“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.”

“I do think that Americans do not understand that things are done differently in other parts of the world and that the other ways people do things are equally accurate ways to do things. Someone else just came up with something different.”

“'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.”

“With each book, I'm trying to do something that terrifies me.”

“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 never wanted to be a scientist.”

“Travel is hard, and it's mostly not your fault.”

“My country is nothing if not diverse.”

“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 grew up in the suburbs, which I don't think shaped me very much.”