” You write three pages over six hours, and you don’t feel like you’ve gotten anywhere, but if you’ve done a beautiful metaphor or a lovely sentence, or you finally got to some moment you wanted, then that’s worth it. Then you can close your computer and get a little relief. “
” 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. “
” A lot of problems get solved in those sort of in-between moments when your subconscious has been working on some problem. If you keep it spinning, you can fix ideas sometimes better than if you focus on them directly. “
” Travel is hard, and it’s mostly not your fault. “
” Can you call and thank reviewers? I always wondered that. “
” I hadn’t meant to do the pattern of publishing short stories and then a novel. I thought, ‘I’m a novelist. I know it.’ But you have to kind of write a lot of bad novels before you can write a good one, I think, so I did that. But meanwhile, I loved the short stories I did. “
” They had a contest where they would – for some reason, someone in the past loved musical theater, and so if you wrote a musical, they would fully fund it and put it on the main stage with full costumes and a set and everything, and my roommate said we should totally do that. “
” I think screenplay is hard. I’ve tried that, and it felt really difficult, like, all the stuff I think I’m good at, like description and internal experience and memory, you can’t do that – or, at least, I couldn’t figure out a way. “
” Really, what you should tell a novelist is, ‘Keep going until you finish the draft. Don’t show it to anyone. “
” It’s hard to tell if I’ve had writer’s block because it seems to me that it’s when nothing comes, but, you know, every day you stare at that computer screen, and I think, ‘It’s never going to happen today. How can I write three pages?’ And the hours pass, and they haven’t shown up, and then at the very end it always happens, so it’s willpower. “
All 10 Andrew Sean Greer Quotes about You in picture
Topics: You quotes