Quote

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

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Meg Wolitzer
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: May 28
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Best
Motivation
Thing
Rules
Realize
Realizing
Particular
Somebody
Awhile
Everybody
Variation
Talk
Theme

More quotes by Meg Wolitzer

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Both my mother and I have close groups of friends that include other writers, and these friendships are very important to us.
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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.
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Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.
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You had only one chance for a signature in life, but most people left no impression.
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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.
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People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.
Meg Wolitzer
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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I have never been much of a researcher
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The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.
Meg Wolitzer
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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