ANDREW SEAN GREER

Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'

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

Every writer is an outsider.

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

My grandmother wore a beehive hairdo even when it was out of fashion.

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.

I feel like artists, as much as we'd like to think we're communal, are pretty much loners.

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.

To distract myself from writing, I was singing Bob Dylan's 'My Back Pages.' You know, 'I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.' I thought, 'I should write a character like that.'

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.

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

I don't read literary blogs. I used to read them, but it was upsetting when they would talk, in a snarky way, about my friends.

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

My grandmother was not a great storyteller.

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

I've wanted to be a writer since I was, like, 10.

My country is nothing if not diverse.

A downside to being a successful novelist? Wow - I can't imagine one.

I think what shaped me was I had two parents who were scientists, and especially, they were great readers. They had both grown up in sort of rural parts of the South and were oddballs where they grew up. They were budding intellectuals.

Other writers know what you're going through, what you're talking about when you write.

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.

There must be times when people look in the mirror and they realize they're 60.

I think it would be bad to a truly successful celebrity person, because I know these novelists where people get a cult following, and they have some strange personal attachment to them because it's so personal to read a book.

Can you call and thank reviewers? I always wondered that.

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.