Elizabeth Berg Quotes
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No matter what you write, you need an active imagination.
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People don't take you seriously, so you have to take yourself seriously.
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Women have a real talent for bearing up under hard times.
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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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Oftentimes, I need to write about something in order to understand it.
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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 think Chicago is the best city in the country, hands down, but I don't like the winter there anymore.
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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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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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Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.
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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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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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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'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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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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When you've written long enough, you see that there's a common theme in your work.
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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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If I'm on the road for Random House, I'm presenting a book with the hope people will buy it.
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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 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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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 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.