A biography for Andrew Sean Greerhasn’t been written yet.
“They say you hit your stride as a writer at about 50. I'm hoping to do that.”
“So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.”
“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.”
“I would write these novels about bullies in school: 'The Bullies: a Novel.'”
“A lot of problems get solved in those sort of in-between moments when your subconscious has been working on some problem. If you keep it spinning, you can fix ideas sometimes better than if you focus on them directly.”
“Science fiction writers, when I was a kid, were a big deal.”
“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.”
“My grandmother wore a beehive hairdo even when it was out of fashion.”
“When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.”
“Any gay man in America redeals a deck at some point.”
“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.”
“Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'”
“Change was not something you waited for, quietly, mutely, in a house by the ocean, nothing would ever change unless we forced it into shape.”
“An elephant funeral makes me weep every time, and so does an ad with a kid leaving home for college.”
“Human love and desire is my bag.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I've wanted to be a writer since I was, like, 10.”
“Can you call and thank reviewers? I always wondered that.”
“There's a certain point in chemistry and in calculus where I reached the end of my abilities, and I realized, 'This is where I'm stupid.'”