Latest Meg Wolitzer Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I've been waiting for someone to sign the permission slip for me to write about sex. In the meantime, I've written about sex in all my books anyway.

  Meg Wolitzer

  Sex, Book, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• Objectifying your own novel while writing it never really helps. Instead, I guess while you're writing you need to think: This is the novel I want to write. And when you're done you need to think: This is what the novel I wanted to write feels like and reads like and looks like. Other people might call it sweeping or small, but it's the book you chose.

  Meg Wolitzer

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• We sometimes drive ourselves crazy with how our books will be "seen," when in fact we already know what they're about, and where our obsessions are. If we can spin those obsessions into fiction, then there's a decent chance they will be "fiction-worthy," as you call it. The idea of the "sweep of ideas" is a complicated one.

  Meg Wolitzer

  Crazy, Book, Ideas

  Source: therumpus.net

• We do seem, as a culture, to fetishize the "sweep." But I know there's room for "big" short, fierce novels, and "big" solid ones.

  Meg Wolitzer

  Culture, Rooms, Fierce

  Source: therumpus.net

• "Unputdownable" is, I suppose, something we all dream of, maybe without knowing it. I realized, some time ago, that a novel can hold a lot, and it made sense that this one was not of the sleek and economical variety, but instead the "full" type. Novel as piñata. And the reader does the whacking. I had a central idea, which is to look at what happens to talent over time.

  Meg Wolitzer

  Dream, Ideas, Knowing

  Source: therumpus.net

• For me, a novel relying too heavily on a single idea might be a dry, deadly thing unless it possesses an animating force.

  Meg Wolitzer

  Ideas, Dry, Might

  Source: therumpus.net