Elizabeth Berg Quotes
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I hope to show the great worth of women. So far as I'm concerned, we're still underappreciated.
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I have always believed in helping people whose work I admire.
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My characters are like my children in a way. I create them, and then I worry about them forevermore.
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I find life a mix of humor and pathos, and all my books reflect that to one degree or another.
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In this wide world, I don't think that there's just one person for any of us. I think we look until we find one that feels right, and oftentimes, it works out just fine.
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I've been to Iowa many times before. You have to love Iowa, or you're not an American.
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When I wrote 'Home Safe,' I wanted to look at a number of things: the mystery and joy and pain of creativity. What happens when a vital safety net is suddenly removed. The difficulty some people have in growing up. The way a deep love can be as crippling as it is satisfying. But mostly, I wanted to look at the mother-daughter relationship.
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Everybody knows the mother-daughter relationship is one of the most complex there is.
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I have not been in a book club where there were any men, and I have not, in fact, heard of book groups that were mixed.
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Writing is, of course, a solitary occupation. But for many writers, myself included, it's through writing that we make certain vital connections.
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Nurses don't get paid very much. It didn't take long to realize that I could make more as a writer. I loved nursing, but I loved writing more.
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The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don't plot them ahead of time, and I'm always surprised by things that happen in my books.
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When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both - I never know what's going to happen.
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I look to find the heart and soul of people, of my characters. I look for the truth of them and the truths about life that are presented through them.
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Some people read an interesting or provocative newspaper article, and that's the end of that. A writer reads such an article, and her imagination gets fired up. Questions occur to her. She might feel an urge to finish the story that the article suggests.
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I'm the kind of person who is entertained watching someone simply be themselves, whether they're putting their children to bed or making dinner or sitting at the table reading the morning newspaper.
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You need a place to work that works for you, and you need people to understand that when you are writing, you are doing a rarefied type of brain surgery and therefore should not be subject to a million random interruptions.
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A ritual or tradition can be as simple as something you do every night, like read a story to a small child, or something you do weekly, such as go out for Chinese food.
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Ultimately, the less I know about what I'm doing, the better the work is.
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Life is so fragile, so brief. And we seemingly work so hard at trying to ignore that.
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One of the great pleasures in writing 'The Dream Lover' was learning about some of the real people who populated George Sand's life. What a cast of characters! And what a pleasure to recreate them upon the page!
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If I could visit dead authors, I'd head right over to E. B. White, though I'm so in awe of him I'd probably just sit at his feet and weep. He's the master of clarity, of understated humor, of palatable political conviction.
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Not being as self-contained as men, we need to share things: It's almost as though you only know what you feel about things after you share them with a woman.
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I think titles are extremely important for novels: They can set the tone, tip you off, serve as shorthand for what the essential contents are.