Quotes from Jesse Andrews

'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.

My process is pretty messy, and there's a lot of creative destruction in it. When I set out to write something, I'll write some passages from it just to figure out who these characters are, how they talk. And I have a dim sense of what it's about and where it's going to go, but I know that's going to change, too.

I was in a lot of bands growing up.

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.

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.

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.

You want a storybook kind of closure with someone when they die, but I think that kind of thing is impossible.

I never took creative writing.

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.

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.

I liked art history. Also liked the gender ratio, especially compared to applied math and physics.

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.

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.

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 watched a ton of films growing up, but in a haphazard way. There was nothing scholarly or focused about it.

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

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.

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.

'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.

Everyone's got this hidden infinity that you only get glimpses of. They're always more complex than your conception of them will allow.

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.

I was trained in jazz, which I love.

Hebrew School was my first introduction to real feminism. I remember that much more than I remember any kind of actual religious teaching.

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