215 Quotes by Andrew Sean Greer

I would write these novels about bullies in school: 'The Bullies: a Novel.'

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

I heard you had to get 200 rejections before you got published.

I'm not despairing of love at all.

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

My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Poppy, had us each write a 'novel,' whatever that meant to us. It must have been 10 pages long, and we bound it and colored the front. And she wrote on mine, 'I can't wait till your real novel comes out. Give me a call.'

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.

My mom is an experimental chemist and physicist, so she is a cut-and-dried, nuts-and-bolts kind of woman, and my dad is a theoretical chemist, so we were definitely raised with his philosophical point of view: imaginary numbers and dimensions beyond our own. That's the kind of thing we would talk about.

I was good in biology, but I did very badly in chemistry, and my parents were horrified by that.