Wendy Wasserstein Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

No matter how lonely you get or how many birth announcements you receive, the trick is not to get frightened. There's nothing wrong with being alone.

Wendy Wasserstein
Sometimes I want to clean up my desk and go out and say, respect me, I'm a respectable grown-up, and other times I just want to jump into a paper bag and shake and bake myself to death.

Wendy Wasserstein
Women like us have to learn to give to those who appreciate it instead of to those who expect it.

Wendy Wasserstein
Our lives are not totally random. We make commitments, we cause things to happen.

Wendy Wasserstein
I don't much like to think that being a bachelor girl limits how you see the world. On the other hand, I know it certainly limits how the world sees you.

Wendy Wasserstein
The thing I longed for as a teenager is now an object of neglect and scorn. I've grown to hate my telephone.

Wendy Wasserstein
I'm perpetually curious as to what happened to all those supposed prodigies who were singled out while I and my coterie of far more interesting malcontents passed on.

Wendy Wasserstein
Being funny is a way of being liked and a way of dealing with sadness.

Wendy Wasserstein
Anyone who writes plays is unbelievably persistent, because there isn't a need in the world for plays. Somehow you internally have to feel a need to write a play.

Wendy Wasserstein
I had one Jewish friend there [at Mount Holyoke] from New Jersey who became a Marxist-Leninist gynecologist. How could you not love such a person? Those are the sorts of people you're supposed to meet in college.

Wendy Wasserstein
Sloth is the fastest-growing lifestyle movement in the world, and that's because it is completely doable. If you embrace sloth, it's the last thing you'll ever have to do again.

Wendy Wasserstein
Anyone who is considered funny will tell you, sometimes without even your asking, that deep inside they are very serious, neurotic, introspective people.

Wendy Wasserstein
Feminism has affected me more in my writing than in a specifically political way. Sitting down to write a play that has three parts for women over forty, I think, is political.

Wendy Wasserstein
The problem with writing plays is that everyone has an opinion. And you don't want those opinions. You want people to say I love you no matter what.

Wendy Wasserstein
What I hate about myself and would like to change is that I get hurt very easily. I'm too vulnerable and always have been. I don't look vulnerable. I always think vulnerable girls should have Pre-Raphaelite hair, weigh two pounds, about whom everybody says, Oh, she's so sensitive.

Wendy Wasserstein
A diet counselor once told me that all overweight people are angry with their mothers and channel their frustrations into overeating. So I guess that means all thin people are happy, calm, and have resolved their Oedipal entanglements.

Wendy Wasserstein
Being a grown-up means assuming responsibility for yourself, for your children, and — here's the big curve — for your parents. In other words, you do get to stay up later, but you want to go to sleep earlier.

Wendy Wasserstein
I learn things from watching and listening to people. I'm not much of a reader; I'm slightly dyslexic.

Wendy Wasserstein
When I see the play [The Sisters Rosensweig], I feel I'm seeing a Broadway play in 1958, or what I wish those plays had been. I remember going to them and thinking, I really like this but where are the girls?

Wendy Wasserstein
We're all concerned, intelligent, good women. It's just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn't feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together.

Wendy Wasserstein
The signature of a truly enviable woman is the tenacity and continuity of her women friends.

Wendy Wasserstein
Personally I don't spend much time thinking about being funny. For me it's always been just a way to get by, a way to be likable yet to remain removed. When I speak up, it's not because I have any particular answers; rather, I have a desire to puncture the pretentiousness of those who seem so certain they do.

Wendy Wasserstein
You're the unfortunate contradiction in terms — a serious good person.

Wendy Wasserstein
I'm not going to throw my imagination away. I refuse to lie down to expectation. If I can just hold out till I'm thirty, I'll be incredible.

Wendy Wasserstein
The struggle to be considered a grown-up begins, I believe, shortly after birth.

Wendy Wasserstein
My work is often thought of as lightweight commercial comedy and I have always thought, No, you don't understand: this is in fact a political act.

Wendy Wasserstein
I really worked at becoming more assertive, and now none of my friends talk to me.

Wendy Wasserstein