Andrew Sean Greer

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's funny how the present can change the past.

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.

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.

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.

An elephant funeral makes me weep every time, and so does an ad with a kid leaving home for college.