109 Quotes by Jesse Andrews

My tastes are pretty varied. For instance, I love Wilco. But it's considered dad rock. It's one of my favorite bands, and yet I find it impossible not to think of myself as a dad-in-training when I listen to it.

As a teenager, I didn't read a ton of teen fiction, and now I feel like I wish that I had.

James Joyce actually is rewarding you in all of these incredible ways.

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.

I don't think you can write from a reactive place. I think you just write the thing you want to write about, and if other people are writing about it, that doesn't really come to bear on what you want to do.

In a way, there's nothing new under the sun, so anything you write about has been written about by other people. All you can do is bring yourself to it, bring as much honesty as you can to it.

If something is being written about a lot, there's a conversation there; there's a dialogue there. There's probably a reason for it that it resonates deeply in some way.

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.

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.