Quotes from Meg Wolitzer

I'm not particularly good at doodling. I'll doodle the same face over and over again.

I do want to say the process of writing a novel is riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing.

People say, write what you know, but it's really, write about what obsesses you. Write about what you're thinking about all the time.

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

When you have a book out, it's like a period of protracted or concentrated megalomania, and it's really not normal or good for you or any of that.

'Charlotte's Web,' which I read sitting on my mother's lap, was the most emotional experience: that was when I made the leap from seeing how to untangle words to realizing how books both contain and convey strong feelings.

I think everyone is always measuring themselves against other people to a certain degree; it happens automatically, and it's hard not to be this way at least some of the time.

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

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

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.

I'm really interested in women of different generations... I think there is no one female experience.

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

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.

It's gratifying to be taken seriously, always.

When I was in junior high school, friends and I were in a consciousness-raising group, a term that now seems quaint like a butter churn, but it was very powerful. It was a really wonderful experience.

I really love Scrabble. I played it with my mother growing up. We took it everywhere with us. We didn't know then about the two letter words. Who knew that AA, or more controversially, ZA, or QI were words? We were a games family generally.

I think my writing changed when I put 'the' in front of my titles. It had more command.

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

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.

I believe that sometimes, when we talk about books, we're talking about the big picture - how they're relevant.

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

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

I really like to entertain myself in various ways when I'm writing.

As a novelist, I feel lucky that I can traffic in nuance. I'm more interested in looking at how things change over time, at how people try and sometimes fail to make meaning out of their lives.