A Quote by Andrew Sean Greer

I had never heard of 'young adult novels,' which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something. — © Andrew Sean Greer
I had never heard of 'young adult novels,' which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something.
I never had teenage years. I guess because I was seen to be more adult than anybody around me.
After I had written more than a dozen adult genre novels, an editor I knew in New York asked me to write a mystery for young adults.
When I heard about grooming gangs where almost every individual involved is of Pakistani heritage, I can't help noting that. But I can't helping noting the fact that Rochdale is a town that means something to me, and I'm also of Pakistani heritage.
I'm questioning it. We're trying to get a lot of money for health and education and I'm wondering... You look at these gangs, and I look back at Prohibition. When we didn't allow alcohol, what did we have? We had gangs. We had big gangs. It's something that needs to be discussed a little more. It's an economic issue and a violence issue.
In young adult novels and children's books, you stay in moment. The story goes through a school year or a weekend. You never get a sense of a future self because the young person has not lived that yet.
I've found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new things: that is things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new.
Well, I never got into the young adult headspace. With 'Twilight,' they are pretty adult themes, aside from maybe the first one, but even that. They're very adult themes, actually, particularly as the characters age. I never wrote for young adults. I wrote for myself, as an audience.
To see what books were available for my older students, I made many trips to the library. If a book looked interesting, I checked it out. I once went home with 30 books! It was then that I realized that kids' novels had the shape of real books, and I began to get ideas for young adult novels and juvenile books.
In the '60s and '70s, people didn't pay a lot of attention to gangs. I think gangs still existed, but gangs had fallen out of criminological favor.
I read YA novels constantly, so I really want to be in a young adult rom-com, but I worry that I'm aging into the parent role, which is a little scary.
I am trying to come up with some "adult" reads, but I mostly read young adult fiction (my job), which, by the way is excellent. I will post about some of my favorites that should appeal to adult readers
I think so much of young adult literature sort of gets ghettoized - the title 'young adult' makes people immediately discount it. And just like with books that get written for adults, there is plenty of young adult literature that is bad. But there is also plenty of young adult literature that is brilliant.
I was a teenage girl once. I was not an overweight teenage girl, but I had really bad acne when I was 11 or 12 years old. It was heart-rending, and people made fun of me. People whispered when I walked by in the hallways, and I was sure they were whispering about me. My adult perspective is maybe they weren't.
Y'know, I think, inherently, when you hear something like a teenage narrative come into play, even the idea that it's being called 'teenage' is a notion that it's being reduced to a problem that's not quite adult. That's a problematic thing to say about a narrative that could actually be dangerous, could be hurtful, could be upsetting.
I think, for many teens, a fundamental fact of the teenage experience is that you're in between this childlike state, in which you're told you're completely unqualified for just about anything in the adult world, and this adult world, where you're being told you have to be responsible, and you're just trying to figure out where you stand.
I was this person with this weird last name from New York that no one had ever heard of. But my screen test I guess, according to him, was the best. So I got the part, which was incredible.
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