Meg Wolitzer famous quotes

Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star...
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Teacher #Stars #Littles

Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Writing #Good Writing

While it's true that some writers, when taking on love and war, find the task too big, or only succeed in one but not the other, Mengestu tracks both themes with authority and feeling.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#War #Track #Feelings

I always thought it was the saddest and most devastating ending. How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself smaller over time. I don't want that to happen to me.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Life #Dream #Knowing

You had only one chance for a signature in life, but most people left no impression.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#People #Signatures #Chance

The child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Children #Parent #Jackpot

People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#People #Enough #Lost

Part of the beauty of love was that you didn’t need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain. With love, apparently you didn’t necessarily feel the need to explain anything at all.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Needs #Feels #Refuse

But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#People #Wells #Stills

And specialness - everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren't talented. So what are they supposed to do - kill themselves?
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Jesus #People #Essentials

Twitter," said Manny, waving his hand. "You know what that is? Termites with microphones.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Hands #Said #Microphones

After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Powerful #Stronger #Age

But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the way they wanted to live.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Art #College #Thinking

Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Book #Fire #Light

New teachers were just a part of life, for a few days after one arrived, squawks of interest were emitted from various corners, but then they died away as the teacher was absorbed like everyone else...before you knew it, the fresh ones seemed to have been teaching there forever too, or else they didn't last very long, and were gone before you'd gotten to know them.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Teacher #Teaching #Long

But it had no doubt sprung from true emotion, for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Teacher #Children #Parent

And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Self #Envy #Interesting

But, she knew, you didn’t have to marry your soulmate, and you didn’t even have to marry an Interesting. You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Soulmate #Sleep #Play

I have never been much of a researcher
-- Meg Wolitzer

In The Interestings I wanted to write about what happens to talent over time. In some people talent blooms, in others it falls away.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Fall #Writing #People

The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Creative #Busy #Lifetime

Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Sleep #Someone You Like

People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Passion #People #Long

To be anorexic...she thought, amounted to wanting to shed yourself of some of the imperfect mosaic of pieces that made you who you were. She could understand that now for, maybe underneath that desquamated self you would locate a new version.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Self #Pieces #Mosaics

You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Lonely #Children #Long

Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Children #Unhappy #Your Children

It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#People #Way #Adapted

But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Taken #One Day #World

The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Information #Bread #Generations

The minute you had kids you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls—even if you'd once been best friends—was now just that, outsiders.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Wall #Kids #Rocks

Both my mother and I have close groups of friends that include other writers, and these friendships are very important to us.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Mother #Important #Groups

When I wrote The Interestings, I wanted to let time unspool, to give the book the feeling of time passing. I had to allow myself the freedom to move back and forth in time freely, and to trust that readers would accept this.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Moving #Book #Giving

But it's never just been the journals that have made the difference, I don't think. It's also the way the students are with one another . . . the way they talk about books and authors and themselves. Not just their problems, but their passions too. The way they form a little society and discuss whatever matters to them. Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Book #Passion #Thinking

And I also know that pain can seem like an endless ribbon. You pull it and you pull it. You keep gathering it toward you, and as it collects, you really can't believe that there's something else at the end of it. Something that isn't just more pain. But there's always something else at the end; something at least a little different. You never know what that thing will be, but it's there.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Pain #Believe #Littles

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Artist #Ties #Being An Artist

Everybody has a theme. You talk to somebody awhile, and you realize they have one particular thing that rules them. The best you can do is a variation on the theme, but that's about it.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Motivation #Variation #Realizing

Being an adult child was an awkward, inevitable position. You went about your business in the world: tooling around, giving orders, being taken seriously, but there were still these two people lurking somewhere who in a split second could reduce you to nothing. In their presence, you were a big-headed baby again, crawling instead of walking.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Baby #Children #Taken