Jesse Andrews

Why do I love Roald Dahl? His voice, more than anything. It's irreproducible. It's so musical, and it's funny even when it's not trying to be, which is most of the time.

I was trained in jazz, which I love.

The Haters' has some of the generalities of band experiences that I've had - the camaraderie, the grubbiness, the outsized collective ambitions and frequent painful collisions with reality - but very few of the specifics. I guess it was a way for me to take some of my experiences to their logical crazy extremes.

My grandfather was terminally ill, and any interaction with him felt so incomplete. It seemed impossible to say or do anything that was enough. And, of course, that was true. Nothing could have been enough.

If you're in a band for long enough, you see your bandmates at their best and their worst, and if you can stick together through that, you're basically family to each other.

Hebrew School was my first introduction to real feminism. I remember that much more than I remember any kind of actual religious teaching.

Young adult fiction is getting more popular among adults because the writer is trying hard all the time to maintain the reader's interest.

I went to a really diverse and wonderful school in inner-city Pittsburgh, where all the various groups and types of people got along pretty great, and a lot of interesting stuff was going on all the time - and I still hated high school. It's just a rough, rough period in one's life.

You never say and do the things you wish you had said or done when someone close to you may not be around in awhile. Closure is impossible; that's the heart of the grief you will carry with you for the rest of your life.

I never took creative writing.

My first drafts are always terrible, and I hate them, but the process for me is all about writing the bad version until it tells you what the good version is. And then you write that.

My process is pretty messy, and there's a lot of creative destruction in it. When I set out to write something, I'll write some passages from it just to figure out who these characters are, how they talk. And I have a dim sense of what it's about and where it's going to go, but I know that's going to change, too.