Andrew Sean Greer

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

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

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

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.'

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.

Science fiction writers, when I was a kid, were a big deal.

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.

For writers: don't hold back. Be weird. Be sentimental. Be melodramatic. Take the risk of being not-cool, not-hip.

My grandmother was not a great storyteller.

Every writer is an outsider.

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