Meg Wolitzer Quotes

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

With memoir, you have the clay of your life to work with. When you're writing a novel, you have to make the clay first.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

Writers do draw inspiration from their own lives, which, quite frankly, might be more interesting than fiction.

I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.

They say that every writer, they write about himself, and I think that to a certain extent that is true. But also we are creators of fiction.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

I make up stories about people who are either imaginary or some variation of myself.

My books aren't autobiographical.

My writing, it's mostly fiction, but I want it to feel intimate and real.

So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

I think I do more fiction than autobiography.

As writers, our job is to try to create, in a fake space, something that feels true. That's just straight-up fiction: Invent a character that doesn't exist; make them seem like they do.

Sometimes I'll write something that's purely autobiographical, and sometimes pure fiction, and sometimes a mix.

Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'