Meg Wolitzer Quotes

Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

Each book first begins with a little idea.

I don't know exactly where the ideas come from. One day, a sentence just popped into my head - 'There was going to be trouble, and, hell, he just wasn't in the mood for it' - and I knew I had a novel.

I know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't.

I remember how I would wait for a play idea. I wasted a tremendous amount of time. I didn't realize that ideas could be made into movies or novels.

Once I have a story idea I like it doesn't even matter to me what genre it is, I'm just so happy to have one.

I'll usually see a scene in my head, playing like a movie trailer. After I've written that scene, everything takes off from there.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

I hate thinking about writer's block! I don't have writer's block much, knock on wood, but if I do, I think it's usually because I haven't done enough research and am therefore unable to create a fully realized world.

I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.

If one day a TV series comes into my head, and that is what I want to write, I'll write it. It just depends what story is in my brain at the time.

I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.

Normally book ideas come to me in a moment.

I've never dreamed of a story idea. I have such boring dreams.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

I'm pretty restless in bed, so I can lie there for a couple of hours and be like, 'Hey, that happened today. What if that happened at a zoo?' I'll jot the idea down. Then I'm like, 'All right, so now that it's a zoo, that penguin's loose,' or, whatever. I usually start with broad ideas.

What I have to write, the story, it is always going on in my mind. What incidences I can add in the story - it is a continuous process.

I'm often asked how I get ideas for my stories. The answer is there's no single way; every story is different.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

If you take a few days to write an outline, you're just making up scenes that you think will work, that you think will be interesting. But as you write it, other ideas occur - better ideas that have to do with what you're writing.

Being a playwright is like the equivalent of doing a jigsaw puzzle that has 1,500 pieces, and it's a jigsaw of a blue sky. Not a cloud in sight.