Elizabeth Berg Quotes
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People don't take you seriously, so you have to take yourself seriously.
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As a child, I saw my mother prepare for Christmas every year, and it never occurred to me that labor was involved. I thought it was my mother's joy and privilege to hang tinsel on the tree strand by strand, to make sure that every room in the house had a touch of Christmas, down to the Santa-themed rug and hand towels in the bathroom.
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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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Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.
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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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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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If there were a category in the Olympics for laundry, my mother would have been a gold-medal winner.
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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 don't have a medicine cabinet.
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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 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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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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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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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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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.
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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 love libraries, as anyone who has a brain does.
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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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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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Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.
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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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People see 'tradition' as something stultifying, old, and rigid, nothing that has meaning or application for us today. But families shouldn't have to follow the blueprint of the old. They can make family traditions out of whatever makes them feel comfortable and helps bring a sense of order and stability to their lives.
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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.