Elizabeth Berg Quotes
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Ultimately, the less I know about what I'm doing, the better the work is.
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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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When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads.
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It is one thing to see your friend dance around a table when she's 25, quite another thing to see her doing it when she's 62.
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I think conflict is one of the things that makes for a good story.
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I loved the 'Three Stooges.' I still do - nyuk, nyuk.
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I like my house to feel like a place where I can just lie back and say, 'Ahhhhh, I'm home.'
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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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I tend not to write books that are really, really long, and I'm also a pretty fast writer.
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If I could say anything to aspiring writers, it's to keep your own counsel, first and foremost.
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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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Writing was always a release for me, a great joy. It wasn't work.
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Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.
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I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy.
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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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It feels like my books come true. I write these things, and then they kind of end up happening. I wasn't divorced, for example, when I wrote a book about divorce.
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No matter what kind of writing you do, it's always the details that make the story.
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In writing a novel about George Sand, I hoped to present her as the talented, beguiling, complicated and occasionally infuriating woman I think she was, but I hope, too, that readers will enjoy the people she surrounded herself with.
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I love libraries, as anyone who has a brain does.
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No, I am not my mother. I am deeply, endlessly grateful for what she did and who she was, but I am a different kind of person.
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Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.
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If there were a category in the Olympics for laundry, my mother would have been a gold-medal winner.
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No matter what you write, you need an active imagination.
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The friends in my real life do tend to be smart and funny and creative. I am lucky!