Quotes by Jennifer Weiner

“An apple a day keeps the homework away,”

“We dont care if shes slaying vampires or working as a nanny or living in Philadelphia. Its chick lit, so who cares? You know what we call what men write? Books.”

“The place looked like an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue,”

“the sassy best friend.”

“where happiness and happily ever-after doesnt begin at size 0 and end at size 6 and where there are possibilities for love and happiness and professional success and great friends and a wonderful life even if you dont look like one of those girls in the magazines.”

“You need the sizzle to sell the steak. Maybe people will pick up this book and go see the movie.”

“Its important for there to be women in the public eye who are bigger than these little twig movie stars.”

“Though details of the book are specific to Connecticut, ... what happens on the playground with the mothers (their social competition) is sort of universal. ... The irony is that even the women who seem to be the most together are feeling the same sort of insecurity. I think that theres anxiety felt by women who gave up careers in the city and wonder about the choice, and do that The grass is greener thing. Theres this pervasive attitude in America that if you have money nothing can go wrong, which isnt true ... often, economic security in fact is illusory.”

“Kate has a lot of anxiety about not living up to the standard of motherhood in this town, in this context,”

“The larger things that this book -- and all my books -- revolve around are a womans id, ... And how she defines herself in the world around her. ... Ive always been interested in issues of what has been defined as maternity and how its changed. ... For both Kate and Kitty, theyre twins in a way; I didnt want to whack the reader over the head with it, but with Kate, her mother was the sun that everything revolves around, and for Kitty, it was about a mother that wasnt there.”

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them youre working. Tell them its research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.

Tell the story thats been growing in your heart, the characters you cant keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.

This thing that I created, this thing I made as a woman, for other women, is worth something. Its worth exactly the same as what a similar thing, built by a man, for men, is worth.

I had started on the marriage and motherhood beat by accident with a post on my personal, read only by friends, blog called ‘Fifty Shades of Men’. I had written it after buying Fifty Shades of Grey to spice up what Dave and I half-jokingly called our grown up time, and had written a meditation on how the sex wasn’t the sexiest part of the book. “Dear publishers, I will tell you why every woman with a ring on her finger and a car seat in her SUV is devouring this book like the candy she won’t let herself eat.” I had written. “It’s not the fantasy of an impossibly handsome guy who can give you an orgasm just by stroking your nipples. It is instead the fantasy of a guy who can give you everything. Hapless, clueless, barely able to remain upright without assistance, Ana Steele is that unlikeliest of creatures, a college student who doesn’t have an email address, a computer, or a clue. Turns out she doesn’t need any of those things. Here is the dominant Christian Grey and he’ll give her that computer plus an iPad, a beamer, a job, and an identity, sexual and otherwise. No more worrying about what to wear. Christian buys her clothes. No more stress about how to be in the bedroom. Christian makes those decisions. For women who do too much—which includes, dear publishers, pretty much all the women who have enough disposable income to buy your books—this is the ultimate fantasy: not a man who will make you come, but a man who will make agency unnecessary, a man who will choose your adventure for you.

The condom broke. I know how stupid that sounds. Its the reproductive version of the dog ate my homework.

mooo, she said... I mean mmmm, she moaned. Louder this time. Goddamn Dr. Seuss is ruining my sex life.

Maybe love was a myth anyhow, a brew of hormones and fantasy, evolutions way of getting men and women together long enough for them to procreate,back in the day when girls got pregnant at twelve, were pregnant or nursing for the next twenty years, and were dead of the plague by forty.