Elizabeth Berg Quotes
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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 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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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'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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Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.
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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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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 love libraries, as anyone who has a brain does.
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Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.
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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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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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People don't take you seriously, so you have to take yourself seriously.
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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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Oftentimes, I need to write about something in order to understand it.
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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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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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As we continue to become a society of tweets, shorter and shorter messages, there's great value in the contemplation and reflection that comes from reading a long body of work.
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Women have a real talent for bearing up under hard times.
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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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When I look at my own work, I see love, loss, and loneliness. Part of it might be that I was an army brat. I moved around all the time. There was a sense of nothing being permanent.
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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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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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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 don't have a medicine cabinet.