Meg Wolitzer Quotes

I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc.

I know I have a problem with semi-colon abuse and have written page-long sentences. Nobody needs to be reading page-long sentences, at least not written by me.

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

I'm a 'frotteur,' someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader's hair frizzy. There's a question of pacing.

Every sentence stands on its own. Whether that's fair or not, that's kind of the way it is.

I enjoy finding the right word and giving each its full measure, its full space in a sentence.

I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

Each author has his or her own voice. I read each book slowly so I can see the patterns they use to spread out the garden of earthly delights.

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.

To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.

Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in.

As any competent student of literary composition knows, the more natural and casual a voice sounds in print, the more likely it is to have been edited time and again.

I think striking the right tone for your story is, if you like, the alchemical work of writing.

I write the way I write.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

Writing is not like acting, where you can pull these little stunts that create a particular effect. Words are all it is about, and the way you use words has to be individual and particular to you.

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.