Jennifer Weiner Quotes

Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll; women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant.

I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.

I noticed in the past, a lot of guys who like strong women, they really freak out if you're not strong 24/7. Or they complain about you being strong, then the moment you're not strong, they're like, 'Oh, no, no, no.'

Why is it men are permitted to be obsessed about their work, but women are only permitted to be obsessed about men?

I hate how box-office failures are blamed on an actress, yet I don't see a box-office failure blamed on men.

It is very hard to be a female leader. While it is assumed that any man, no matter how tough, has a soft side... and female leader is assumed to be one-dimensional.

If it's a woman, it's caustic; if it's a man, it's authoritative.

Women in leadership cannot cry without raising a storm of commentary.

Men are able to sustain a career into their 50s and 60s and still present themselves as sex symbols. With women, on the other hand, people say, 'Why doesn't she retire?'

I never used to see anything on TV where the man was in the weaker position. It was always the female showing emotion, breaking down, being emotionally torn apart by men.

Bad behaviour makes men more glamorous. Women get destroyed, thrown out of society and locked up in institutions.

Confidence in a bloke would be arrogance in a woman. For years, I didn't give interviews because I was scared of people judging me or thinking I was arrogant.

You come across words all the time that are everyday sexism. I was described as 'competently bossy' and 'bossily competent' by a male journalist, and I thought, 'Gosh, 'bossy' is never used of a man.'

It's more acceptable for guys to get old and craggy and become wonderful character actors as they get older, but women aren't allowed to get old and craggy in the same way.

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

A woman can laugh and cry in three seconds and it's not weird. But if a man does it, it's very disturbing. The way I'd describe it is like this: I have been allowed inside the house of womanhood, but I feel that they wouldn't let me in any of the interesting rooms.

Books about women and children are not valued in the same way as a book about war. And why is that? I don't know.

It's incredibly unfair. You don't see a lot of 60-year-old women with 20-year-old men onscreen.

Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, "She doesn't have what it takes." They will say, "Women don't have what it takes.”

If you are a man, you have to be like Joe McCarthy to be called “ruthless”. For a woman, all you have to do is put somebody on hold.

I'm not saying it's easy, and it's definitely harder for women. Because there is definitely a double standard about gorgeous older men, and it's different for older women.

If I'm going to be honest about it, I think men get to do this sort of thing all the time. You look at countless performances by great male actors who get to play the whole gamut of human emotions. Women aren't regularly allowed to do that, and I don't know why people are so frightened by it.

Years ago, I worked in a newspaper office, and there were men that would have fits of temper, and it was just accepted that that's who they were, and everyone would laugh about it, but if a woman got upset or angry, something wasn't right: she was 'hysterical' or 'a little unhinged.' It didn't have the same sort of connotation at all.

We live with a distinct double standard about male and female aggression. Women's aggression isn't considered real. It isn't dangerous; it's only cute. Or it's always self-defense or otherwise inspired by a man. In the rare case where a woman is seen as genuinely responsible, she is branded a monster - an 'unnatural' woman.

Because I'm a woman writing about women who do bad things, that's somehow very 'other.' When men write that, it's called a novel. It's just a book.