Meg Wolitzer

I think a lot of the dull parts of first drafts come from a kind of over-managing, intrusive writer who wants to direct traffic. The idea of taking out the parts that the reader could infer is very liberating, and it's weirdly part of radicalizing your work: it allows you to go to new places fast.

It's hard for me to feel bad when I'm writing well.

We all want to write the kind of book that we want to read. If you put in the things that you are thinking about and create characters who feel like they could live - at least for me, that's the way I want to write.

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.

These are old issues. Female power, misogyny, the treatment of women, how you make meaning in the world. And these are all issues that I've been thinking about and writing about for a very long time.

Pleasure' is a word I think about a lot, as opposed to 'entertainment.' They are very, very different.

I love guacamole and think about it a lot when I'm supposed to be thinking about language.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.