Elizabeth Berg Quotes
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I've always felt an overwhelming need to get out what was inside. The vehicle for me was words on paper - not speech, not art, not dance, not anything else.
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Traditions are the inventions of people who mean to routinely put love and comfort and meaning into their lives and in the lives of those they live with.
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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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In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.
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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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I do think that there's an art form to parenting, and I have nothing but admiration for those who do it well.
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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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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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Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.
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I got married at twenty-five and had children right away, so I didn't have the worry that I would never get to have children.
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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 remember, as a child, wanting all the time to buy my parents presents. I stood around forlornly in fancy shops, unable to afford a single thing.
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I love libraries, as anyone who has a brain does.
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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?
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Writers have a reputation for being distracted. That's because writers are distracted. They are always tuned into that other voice, the one in their head that rarely turns off.
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With 'Durable Goods,' I meant only to write about being an army brat. What emerged was a story about compassion - the need for it, the expression of it.
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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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For me as a writer, it's so joyful to know that someone hears and responds to what I write.
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Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.
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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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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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When you have that deep kind of hunger that is part longing, what's better to eat than the best apple pie? Or the best potato salad and guacamole? Or the best deviled eggs and crab cakes and white chocolate raspberry pie?
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Women have a real talent for bearing up under hard times.
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No, I never thought that I would be a writer. I had always been told I could write well, but it never occurred to me that I might make my living that way.