Elizabeth Berg Quotes
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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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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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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.
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I think conflict is one of the things that makes for a good story.
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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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I tend not to write books that are really, really long, and I'm also a pretty fast writer.
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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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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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I love libraries, as anyone who has a brain does.
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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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Writing was always a release for me, a great joy. It wasn't work.
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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 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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If there were a category in the Olympics for laundry, my mother would have been a gold-medal winner.
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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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Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.
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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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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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I think Chicago is the best city in the country, hands down, but I don't like the winter there anymore.
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I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy.
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As for my 'real life,' yes, I do have friends who are different from me, and I find it refreshing being around them.
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Women have a real talent for bearing up under hard times.