Meg Wolitzer Quotes

In the era of Venus Williams, girliness and goo isn't the way to every woman's heart. Yet publishers presume that women only buy a book that looks soft and that appears to be all about women, even if it isn't. Yet women, unlike men, buy books by and about both sexes.

People put stock in someone being in a 'girl group,' but we don't say that a band is a 'man group.'

When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.

When my friends and I would act out movies as kids, we'd play the guys' roles, since they had the most interesting things to do. Decades later, I can hardly believe my sons and daughter are seeing many of the same limited choices in current films.

No one knows 'men' as such, any more than anyone knows 'women,' and if they do generalise they're probably trying to hide their own ignorance. You might know one 'man,' yes, or even lots of individual 'men'.

An actor is something less than a man, while an actress is something more than a woman.

Women's director! Well, I'm very pleased to be considered a master of anything, but remember, for every Jill there was a Jack. People like to pigeonhole you - it's a shortcut, I guess, but once they do, you're stuck with it.

There aren't good roles for women: the female parts aren't developed: the women are serving the men.

Once, power was considered a masculine attribute. In fact, power has no sex.

My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.

People don't always want to have females as leaders.

Women exist in my imagination. So they are necessarily a type of abstraction. Many women criticise me for this vision, but I explain to them it's to be expected, because I am a man.

In a lot of TV shows out there, the women are the weak ones, and the men are the strong ones.

I am tired of women playing action heroes like men, because they are not men. But sometimes they are written like men.

Female authors were still using male names when I was young, or they were neatly shoehorned into 'women's books' except for those few that men could always point at when the disparity was pointed out.

Chick flick is not a term used to praise a movie. Nobody says 'it's a great chick flick.' It's a way of being derisive. I'm not clear why it's ok to do it.

Books written by boys are given very different treatment to those written by girls: they're even given very different covers. People also expect, in this YA-booming world, girls to be less experimental than boys: girls are achieving a lot of success, but they're confined.

Both men and women are really vast and boundless and yet in many films we're told that they're not. We're told they can only be one thing - like handsome and charming and that's it. Nothing more.

The funniest things just come from honesty. We have a tendency to see female characters as representative of something larger than what they are, when male characters are just characters.

Genres do exist because frequent users of any large bookstore can instantly tell what any piece of fiction is supposed to be about by its title, its cover and its location in the shop.

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?'

Writers write these male stereotypes, and it makes it ten times more interesting if a woman says the lines.

With a male-centric show, the women are usually very two-dimensional.

The only moment I become aware of being the only woman in a meeting is when actresses are being discussed. If someone's critical of how a woman looks, they turn to me and apologize.

Part of the problem is that many directors treat female characters too often as precious. Or they want to live in a fantasy world where they just do spinning hook kicks and knock out guys who are six foot four, and that doesn't work either.