Elizabeth Berg Quotes
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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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I loved the 'Three Stooges.' I still do - nyuk, nyuk.
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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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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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Ultimately, the less I know about what I'm doing, the better the work is.
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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 think conflict is one of the things that makes for a good story.
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I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy.
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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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Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.
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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 tend not to write books that are really, really long, and I'm also a pretty fast writer.
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Writing was always a release for me, a great joy. It wasn't work.
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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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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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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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The friends in my real life do tend to be smart and funny and creative. I am lucky!
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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 love libraries, as anyone who has a brain does.
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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 never was a big believer that you can teach writing per se.
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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.