Jennifer Weiner Quotes

My favorite sci-fi always uses its hook to amplify some bigger theme or idea - some emotional thrust.

Comic-strip artists generally have very modest ambitions. Day to day, we labor to fit together all these little moving parts - a character or two, a few lines of dialogue, framing, pacing, payoff - but we certainly don't think of them adding up over time to some larger portrait of our times.

Is there nothing the prodigiously talented Ann Patchett can't do? She's channeled the world of opera, Boston politics, magic, unwed motherhood, and race relations, creating scenarios so indelible, you swear they are right outside your door.

Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.

I think it's Jerry's masterful fiction writing.

I didn't necessarily have a total idea when I was writing the movie of where everything was going. I just wanted to have really realistic dialogue and write like people I knew talked. I tried to keep it very real.

I've always loved the writing of Aaron Sorkin. He cleverly intersperses big issues alongside personal relationships.

A good comic explores the imagination, but it's always got to have those notes of truth running through it.

You have to have a strong idea for a hit movie, a strong core idea that resonates emotionally. It also has to technically achieve its goal - it's got to be well-written, well-paced, and interestingly told.

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

I think, for me, there's The Book I Should Write and The Book I Wanted to Write - and they weren't the same book. The Book I Should Write should be realistic, since I studied English Lit. It should be cultural. It should reflect where I am today. The Book I Wanted to Write would probably include flying women, magic, and all of that.

I have a background writing screenplays and teleplays. I've tried to write prose and fiction but never really completed anything I thought worthy of publication or worthy of anyone else to even look at.

I am a newspaper columnist and a professional screenwriter, but my real love is the novel for all the room it has for characters to come alive and breathe and face their challenges.

I think what I look for in a script, it's the relatability quotient that matters the most.

I look at a show like 'Roseanne.' That's super influential on me. It's very funny, very real, with real problems. That was a big influence, and I don't know if you see that all the time in the network world.

Films are never meant as solutions; they just provide entertainment value.

Novels describe what it means to be alive at a given moment.

I don't think I have a very novelistic brain. I like to read, but I don't know if I could ever write a novel.

Writing a whole series was a crash course in screenwriting, which is a very different muscle to standup comedy writing.

I think it helped that 'Fleabag' had such a dramatic arc to it, even though it was disguised as a comedy.