215 Quotes by Andrew Sean Greer

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

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

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

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

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

My mother is a southern lady with short dark hair and a wary, blue-eyed smile. She is also an experimental chemist and teaches a college course entitled The Chemistry of Cooking.

My mother taught me to ask people about the things they love.

Any gay man in America redeals a deck at some point.