Elizabeth Berg Quotes
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People don't take you seriously, so you have to take yourself seriously.
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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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Women have a real talent for bearing up under hard times.
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Oftentimes, I need to write about something in order to understand it.
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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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No matter what you write, you need an active imagination.
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It is true that all mothers do things differently from their own mothers, but they don't necessarily do them better.
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I always wrote as a vehicle for expression but did not try writing for publication until my mid-thirties, at which time I started writing for magazines. I wrote essays and then short stories, then moved into novels.
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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 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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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'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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Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.
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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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I think writers are born, not made.
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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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I think it's harder - much harder - to be a good parent than to write a book.
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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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When you've written long enough, you see that there's a common theme in your work.
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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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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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I suppose writing nonfiction did prepare me for writing fiction. Whenever you write anything, you're honing your skills for writing anything else.
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If I'm on the road for Random House, I'm presenting a book with the hope people will buy it.