Jesse Andrews Quotes

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.

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.

I fought tooth and nail: I didn’t want to learn Hebrew. My Bar Mitzvah came around, and I didn’t want to read the Torah portion. I look back with a lot of chagrin about how I behaved.

‘Munmun’ happened because the human world’s dizzying inequality – of wealth and of power – had begun to send me over the edge, and I had to write something to try to help myself understand it a little better.

If you’re in a band for long enough, you see your bandmates at their best and their worst, and if you can stick together through that, you’re basically family to each other.

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.

As a teenager, I was undeveloped and out of touch. The arts was another arena in which to do combat and challenge myself. I read difficult books like James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ but I didn’t really understand it, and no one was going to call me on it because I was 16.

It wasn’t until I got to college and had a lot of my ego beaten out of me… That’s when I started to turn to literature as something deeper than a way to put up points.

I’m influenced by Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace: writers who are often not content to just stack paragraphs and have to break out of that.

Why do I love Roald Dahl? His voice, more than anything. It’s irreproducible. It’s so musical, and it’s funny even when it’s not trying to be, which is most of the time.

Young adult fiction is getting more popular among adults because the writer is trying hard all the time to maintain the reader’s interest.

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.

‘The Haters’ has some of the generalities of band experiences that I’ve had – the camaraderie, the grubbiness, the outsized collective ambitions and frequent painful collisions with reality – but very few of the specifics. I guess it was a way for me to take some of my experiences to their logical crazy extremes.

I think screenwriting gave me more of an affinity for plot – my first novel, ‘Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,’ doesn’t have a very sophisticated roadmap. But screenwriting required me to learn a higher level of plottiness, and I tried to bring that to ‘The Haters.’

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

You never say and do the things you wish you had said or done when someone close to you may not be around in awhile. Closure is impossible; that’s the heart of the grief you will carry with you for the rest of your life.

I started playing music around 13 or 14, played jazz in high school, and played other stuff in college. After college, I tried to make it as a musician. I lived in a big squalid house full of dudes outside of Boston. We were all musicians. We built this studio in the basement and played there all hours of the day.

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.