Elizabeth Berg Quotes
-
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.
-
When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both - I never know what's going to happen.
-
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.
-
When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads.
-
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.
-
Ultimately, the less I know about what I'm doing, the better the work is.
-
I think conflict is one of the things that makes for a good story.
-
Life is so fragile, so brief. And we seemingly work so hard at trying to ignore that.
-
The friends in my real life do tend to be smart and funny and creative. I am lucky!
-
Writing was always a release for me, a great joy. It wasn't work.
-
Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.
-
I like my house to feel like a place where I can just lie back and say, 'Ahhhhh, I'm home.'
-
No matter what you write, you need an active imagination.
-
I never was a big believer that you can teach writing per se.
-
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.
-
I tend not to write books that are really, really long, and I'm also a pretty fast writer.
-
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.
-
If there were a category in the Olympics for laundry, my mother would have been a gold-medal winner.
-
If I could say anything to aspiring writers, it's to keep your own counsel, first and foremost.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Everybody complains about getting older, but I find it such a rich time of life. There are negative things about it, I suppose, but more than that, I'm finding it to be a very positive experience in which growth suggests itself in a much more alluring way than it did when I was young - isn't that funny?
-
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.
-
No matter what kind of writing you do, it's always the details that make the story.