Andrew Sean Greer

“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'm not despairing of love at all.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.”

“It's just that, you know how it is in some relationships, how one of them is a little more in love. Well, it's like that with friendships. Sometimes one of them thinks they're really close, closer than they are. And the other doesn't feel that way.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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, and they all seem helpful.”

“Other writers know what you're going through, what you're talking about when you write.”

“I don't think I'm a gay activist. I used to be.”

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

“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.”

“'A High Wind in Jamaica' is like those books you used to read under the covers with a flashlight - only infinitely more delicious... and macabre.”