Meg Wolitzer Quotes

I was a big reader as a kid, but it was 'Charlotte's Web' that showed me you could feel as if you were actually living inside a book.

For a child, reading a book can be such an intense experience.

I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.

My earliest, most impactful encounter with a book was when I was seven and awoke early on Christmas morning to find Roald Dahl's 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' in my stocking. I had never been so excited by the sight of a book - and have possibly never been since!

It's like fiction - the fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. You go through heavy emotional responses to these stories, and wrestling is a similar thing - but it's happening in real space.

I was read to as a small child, I read on my own as soon as I could, and I recall being more or less overwhelmed again and again - if not by what the books actually said, by what they suggested, what they helped me to imagine.

I'm not sure that when I read 'Treasure Island' for the first time, when I was about 10, I understood all the words or what was going on. But that didn't stop me reading it, and I certainly didn't forget it.

When I was really little, my favorite book was 'The BFG'. I read it - my teacher in, like, first grade read it to us. I love that book.

Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.

I was a reader as a child, believe it or not.

My earliest memory of books is not of reading but of being read to. I spent hours listening, watching the face of the person reading aloud to me.

When I was a little girl, my first link to the world was as a reader. Sometimes, I feel a nostalgia for those times, for all the emotions I felt as a child - discovering novels, discovering Dickens, Balzac, or Dostoevsky. I wanted to be like those men.

The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world.

What does it feel like to be a parent? What does it feel like to be a child? And that's what stories do. They bring you there. They offer a dramatic explanation, which is always different from an expository explanation.

You put books out into the world, and people form their own visuals and images and attachments to characters; those characters become part of them, and they have their feelings about them.

Stories have always been the things that entertain me and make me feel happy and sad and move me and give me the experience of being able to live many lives in one lifetime. It's the best thing about being alive.

I get to actually experience what it would be like to be a psycho, which is not a fun one, or to be a cowboy, or to be a weird character of some sort. For me, it suits me. It suits my personality. I'm an emotional kind of person anyway.

I love character and voice, and my favourite books have been the ones in which I've become completely absorbed.

Force me to choose my best book, and I always come back to 'Gorilla.' It was the first time I felt I understood what picture books could do.

When I was very little my mother would read to me in bed. She gave me a fascination for stories, and for the music in words.

The experience of reading a book is always unique. I believe that you render a version of the story, when you read a book, in a way that is unique and special to each person who reads it.

My earliest acting memory is making up a play for my mom and dad called The Lonesome Baby. I have no idea what The Lonesome Baby was about. I just remember the title. But I'm sure it was an epic.

When I was a kid, I read books that made me laugh but also made me shiver in terror. I wanted to make books that made other people feel the same way.

I think actors always retain one foot in the cradle. We're switched on to our youth, to our childhood. We have to be because we're in the business of transferring emotions to other people.

My approach as an actor has always been the same, in that the greatest gift that you're ever going to have is your imagination because you're not going to have all life experiences. So you draw on things that are sort of close to it but you spend your time expanding on it or drawing something specific on whatever your situation is.