Top 150 Meg Wolitzer Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Meg Wolitzer

2. “My job does not define me.”

— Meg Wolitzer

3. “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

4. “It’s funny how you can go for a long time in life not needing someone, and then you meet them and you suddenly need them all the time.”

— Meg Wolitzer

5. “The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.”

— Meg Wolitzer

6. “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

7. “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

8. “Good writing is good writing, and I’m so happy when I read it.”

— Meg Wolitzer

9. “Books were an antidepressant, a powerful SSRI.”

— Meg Wolitzer

10. “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

11. “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

12. “Your twenties were a time when you still felt young, but the groundwork was being laid in a serious way, crisscrossing beneath the surface. It was being laid even while you slept. What you did, where you lived, who you loved, all of it was like pieces of track being put down in the middle of the night by stealth workers.”

— Meg Wolitzer

13. “Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives.”

— Meg Wolitzer

14. “Because the truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down. But a mother never should.”

— Meg Wolitzer

15. “We are all here, on this earth for only one go around. And everyone thinks their purpose is to just find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is to find what other people need.”

— Meg Wolitzer

16. “Self-preservation is as important as generosity. Because if you don’t preserve yourself, keep enough for yourself, then of course you have nothing to give.”

— Meg Wolitzer

17. “Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.”

— Meg Wolitzer

18. “Everyone,” she continues, looking around at all of us, “has something to say. But not everyone can bear to say it. Your job is to find a way.”

— Meg Wolitzer

19. “Another spell had been thrust upon her so long ago... She hadn’t been able to see it but it was real. Otherwise why would you rise up from your enclosed and well-defended self and go be with that other person? Why would you open your life, the most secret entries into yourself, to someone you didn’t really know? Who would do that unless she had to?”

— Meg Wolitzer

20. “He couldn’t tell her that what we wanted now, more than anything, was to fall asleep beside her. No touching, no kissing, no stimulation. No sensation, no consciousness. Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.”

— Meg Wolitzer

21. “Sisterhood,” she said, “is about being together with other women in a cause that allows all women to make the individual choices they want. Because as long as women are separate from one another, organized around competition – like in a children’s game where only one person gets to be the princess – then it will be the rare woman who is not in the end narrowed and limited by our society’s idea of what a woman should be.”

— Meg Wolitzer

22. “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

23. “People’s marriages were like two-person religious cults, impossible to understand.”

— Meg Wolitzer

24. “Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to Stop and Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.”

— Meg Wolitzer

25. “Everything you do, it’ll all feel really slow for a long time. But looking back, much later, it will have seemed like it was fast.”

— Meg Wolitzer

26. “Oh tragedy, oh tragedy, the boy said to himself, but he was smiling a little. Oh joy, oh joy. Hearts and stars exploded in the darkness above their heads.”

— Meg Wolitzer

27. “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

28. “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

29. “I’ve always sort of felt that you prepare yourself over the course of your whole life for the big moments, you know? But when they happen, you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they’re not what you thought. And that’s what makes them strange. The reality is really different from the fantasy.”

— Meg Wolitzer

30. “Maybe the secret truth about death is that dead people are whisked away from their current lives and forced to live somewhere else far away – a process similar to reincarnation but taking place not in the future but now. A sort of mortality-based witness protection program. And if you found them they would look the same as they always had. If only you knew where to find them. If only you knew where to look.”

— Meg Wolitzer

31. “She read with “abandon,” it would probably be called, though when you read a book you didn’t abandon anything; instead, you marshaled it all.”

— Meg Wolitzer

32. “Faith Frank hired me, originally, based on nothing. She took me in and she taught me things, and more than that she gave me permission. I think that’s what the people who change our lives always do. They give us permission to be the person we secretly really long to be but maybe don’t feel we’re allowed to be.”

— Meg Wolitzer

33. “Women in powerful positions are never safe from criticism.”

— Meg Wolitzer

34. “The world is so enormous, but if you have places where they know what you like to drink, then all is well.”

— Meg Wolitzer

35. “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

36. “But all she could feel was that he was her friend, her wonderful and gifted friend.”

— Meg Wolitzer

37. “I think there are two kinds of feminists. The famous ones, and everyone else. Everyone else, all the people who just quietly go and do what they’re supposed to do, and don’t get a lot of credit for it, and don’t have someone out there every day telling them they’re doing an awesome job.”

— Meg Wolitzer

38. “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

39. “I think that’s what the people who change our lives always do. They give us permission to be the person we secretly really long to be but maybe don’t feel we’re allowed to be.”

— Meg Wolitzer

40. “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

41. “She used to be really dynamic and exciting and filled with promise, but she’s become this ordinary sort of boring person... 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

42. “Even when I can’t relate on a personal level, she makes me know what she feels, and that’s really something. To find out what another human being feels, a person who isn’t you; to get a look under the hood, so to speak. A deep look inside. That’s what writing is supposed to do.”

— Meg Wolitzer

43. “He’d had a real talent, but what was talent without confidence, self-possession, “ownership,” as people said, pompously but maybe accurately.”

— Meg Wolitzer

44. “Because as you get older, life sort of eats away at you like battery acid, and all the things you once loved are suddenly harder to find. And when you do find them, you don’t have time to enjoy them anymore, you know?”

— Meg Wolitzer

45. “When do I stop? When I’m tewnty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? Or right this minute? Nobody tell s you how long you should keep doing something before you give up forever.”

— Meg Wolitzer

46. “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

47. “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

48. “So many people don’t even know what hits them when they grow up. They feel clobbered over the head the minute the first thing goes wrong, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to avoid pain at all costs. But you all know that avoiding pain is impossible. And I think having that knowledge, plus the experiences you’ve lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.”

— Meg Wolitzer

49. “Sometimes it’s easier to tell ourselves a story.”

— Meg Wolitzer

50. “I guess I feel like grief is this huge part of everything,” I say in a burst. “But you’re supposed to act like it’s not.”

— Meg Wolitzer