Elizabeth Berg Quotes
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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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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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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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I tend not to write books that are really, really long, and I'm also a pretty fast writer.
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I think conflict is one of the things that makes for a good story.
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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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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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It is a happy day when I am asked to publicly recommend a book. It is also a dilemma. When I consider all the books I have loved and depended upon and profited from, how can I pick just one?
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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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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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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 there were a category in the Olympics for laundry, my mother would have been a gold-medal winner.
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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 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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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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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 don't really like questions about the writing process, because the truth is I don't know how I write.
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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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You should not pay too much attention to what anyone tells you, including me. It's very, very important to follow your own map.
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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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I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy.
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I think Chicago is the best city in the country, hands down, but I don't like the winter there anymore.