Meg Wolitzer Quotes

Men often discover their affinity to each other by the mutual love they have for a book.

I love the fact that so many of my readers are intelligent, exceptional, accomplished people with an open-minded love of diversity. But even more than that, I love it when my readers find lasting friendship with others of my readers - knowing that they met through their mutual affection for my books and characters makes me happy!

I want to write a book that makes people debate, and makes people think, interact with each other and exchange ideas... I write because I'm engaged in this big conversation.

I think all it really takes for different people to get along is a common rooting interest and a few beers.

There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."

Isn't that interesting. All the book clubs. I've never belonged to one.

Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long.

In fact, I think every book I've written has been inspired by a real event.

I think at its best, sport does bring us together.

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

If you're part of any kind of writerly community, some of those people will have gone through MFA programs, and their thinking leaks into yours. So whatever changes MFAs have made to the culture, it's to the culture as a whole. It can't be pinned down to individual books in a way that some people would like to do.

I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.

I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.

I think the thing I really got from Ginsberg was that you can tell a story through kind of painting pictures with words. And when I found out that you could have a profession doing that, it was thrilling to me. It just became my passion immediately, playing with words and poetry.

I think if I have established anything in my book, it's that a key element of being my friend is being comfortable with my forced fun.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

The secret to writing is writing. Lots of people I know talk about writing. They will tell me about the book they are going to write, or are thinking about writing, or may write some day in the future. And I know they will never do it. If someone is serious about writing, then they will sit down every day and put some words down on paper.

There were several points where I would kind of turn to the book and say, "Get thee behind me." I don't think real novelists do that. But I make a distinction between prose that's very efficiency-minded (like, the minimum I can get away with), versus loosening the screws and letting the words spill out beautifully and so on.

I love the idea that more people would read short fiction. I think it's such a humanizing form. It softens the boundaries between people.

The less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do.

So this is always the key: you have to write the book you love, the book that's alive in your heart. That's the one you have to write.

I really care about my friends and I think I'm kind of the person who would be rounding up all the friends. I'm always getting everyone together.

Writing is a process and you must trust the process! Fear and anxiety are part of that process along with the enthusaism and the good days and the joy and the passion and the great hopes you have for a book. But when you run into problems, when you get stuck or scared, you must trust that that is part of how a book comes to pass, and what you need to do is get very still and quiet because Self will tell you how to get out of a hole you've dug for yourself.

I don't know if I have a book in me, but I'm sure I have more essays.