Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.
Meg WolitzerAnd 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 WolitzerBut 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 WolitzerIn The Interestings I wanted to write about what happens to talent over time. In some people talent blooms, in others it falls away.
Meg WolitzerYou 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