Jennifer Weiner Quotes

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

I'm not really a mass market writer.

What bothered me most about chick lit, frankly, was how the term was used to dismiss a huge chunk of the bookstore as silly, girlish prattle.

It's never really easy to be successful as a writer when you're trying to write literary fiction. You've already limited your readership limited by that choice.

Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.

To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'.

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.

I am not Shakespeare or Hemingway, but I have written stories on tennis that were brilliant.

There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.

It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.

I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.

I turned to the novel, an artistic form which had in former days been neglected and had thus acquired a bad reputation, but which during the nineteenth century had developed and elevated itself to the ranks occupied by drama and the ancient epic.

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

A few people have tried to make me see that my writing isn't quite their thing by saying to me: 'What about realism?' To which my general response is, 'What about it?' However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, was to say something similar if asked 'What about the fantastic?'

Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

I wanted to see if I could write a good book.

I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.

There's a horrible stereotype of both the romance writer and the romance reader as somehow undereducated and unprofessional, when in fact there are a number of incredibly well-educated professional women who have chosen to leave their other careers and go into writing romance.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

A lot of people think the best work I've done was nonfiction - the 'Brothers and Keepers' book. But I think of myself as a fiction writer. And I think, if my work is put in perspective, all the books would be a continual questioning of what's true and what's not true, what's documented and what's not documented.

I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.