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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.
Elizabeth Berg -
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.
Elizabeth Berg
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If there were a category in the Olympics for laundry, my mother would have been a gold-medal winner.
Elizabeth Berg -
I think Chicago is the best city in the country, hands down, but I don't like the winter there anymore.
Elizabeth Berg -
If I could say anything to aspiring writers, it's to keep your own counsel, first and foremost.
Elizabeth Berg -
The world of literature is so rich and so enriching. The value is inestimable of what reading does for you.
Elizabeth Berg -
People don't take you seriously, so you have to take yourself seriously.
Elizabeth Berg -
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.
Elizabeth Berg
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I don't have a medicine cabinet.
Elizabeth Berg -
I think it's harder - much harder - to be a good parent than to write a book.
Elizabeth Berg -
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.
Elizabeth Berg -
You should not pay too much attention to what anyone tells you, including me. It's very, very important to follow your own map.
Elizabeth Berg -
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.
Elizabeth Berg -
I think writers are born, not made.
Elizabeth Berg
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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.
Elizabeth Berg -
No matter what kind of writing you do, it's always the details that make the story.
Elizabeth Berg -
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.
Elizabeth Berg -
Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.
Elizabeth Berg -
When I lived alone in Chicago, I had a lot of loneliness issues.
Elizabeth Berg -
It usually takes about a year to write each book. I don't plan it that way. I don't set deadlines. If a book wants to take longer, it can.
Elizabeth Berg
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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.
Elizabeth Berg -
Women have a real talent for bearing up under hard times.
Elizabeth Berg -
No matter what you write, you need an active imagination.
Elizabeth Berg -
When I lived in Boston, I had an office that I rented because I found it wonderful to go away from my house to work: It was so quiet, and I couldn't go to the refrigerator or do the laundry.
Elizabeth Berg