Elizabeth Berg Quotes
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I'm nuts about the South - the people, the language, the food, the land, the stories and writers that come from there - but it's hard to know whether I'll use it as a location again.
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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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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 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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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 tend not to write books that are really, really long, and I'm also a pretty fast writer.
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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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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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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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Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.
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Writing was always a release for me, a great joy. It wasn't work.
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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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No matter what kind of writing you do, it's always the details that make the story.
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I love libraries, as anyone who has a brain does.
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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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Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.
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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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I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy.
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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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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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The friends in my real life do tend to be smart and funny and creative. I am lucky!
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I never was a big believer that you can teach writing per se.