Top 66 Elizabeth Berg Quotes

The friends in my real life do tend to be smart and funny and creative. I am lucky!

Women have a real talent for bearing up under hard times.

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.

As for my ‘real life,’ yes, I do have friends who are different from me, and I find it refreshing being around them.

I do think that there’s an art form to parenting, and I have nothing but admiration for those who do it well.

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.

Oftentimes, I need to write about something in order to understand it.

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.

I’m the kind of person who is entertained watching someone simply be themselves, whether they’re putting their children to bed or making dinner or sitting at the table reading the morning newspaper.

My mother and her five sisters have always been living examples of the great love that can exist among sisters – and in a large family.

In writing a novel about George Sand, I hoped to present her as the talented, beguiling, complicated and occasionally infuriating woman I think she was, but I hope, too, that readers will enjoy the people she surrounded herself with.

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.

I just cannot stand an unmade bed.

I like my house to feel like a place where I can just lie back and say, ‘Ahhhhh, I’m home.’

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.

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.

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.

I think it’s harder – much harder – to be a good parent than to write a book.

I hope to show the great worth of women. So far as I’m concerned, we’re still underappreciated.

It is true that all mothers do things differently from their own mothers, but they don’t necessarily do them better.

We’re not just writers; we’re readers probably more than anything else. That’s how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading.

I can’t decide if I’m a hippie or elegant older woman, a farmer’s wife, a crazy person.

I look to find the heart and soul of people, of my characters. I look for the truth of them and the truths about life that are presented through them.

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?

Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.

I have not been in a book club where there were any men, and I have not, in fact, heard of book groups that were mixed.

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.

Ultimately, the less I know about what I’m doing, the better the work is.

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.

Never try to copy other writers, and never try to have a formula. It has to come from your heart and soul.

I know that sometimes it happens that a novelist is embarrassed about their early works. For me, it’s the opposite: I believe ‘Durable Goods’ is the best thing I’ve written.

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.

When you’ve written long enough, you see that there’s a common theme in your work.

The process of writing and creating and answering that very unique call inside yourself has nothing to do with agents and sales and all that stuff.

A ritual or tradition can be as simple as something you do every night, like read a story to a small child, or something you do weekly, such as go out for Chinese food.

You need a place to work that works for you, and you need people to understand that when you are writing, you are doing a rarefied type of brain surgery and therefore should not be subject to a million random interruptions.

I think Chicago is the best city in the country, hands down, but I don’t like the winter there anymore.

I’m nuts about the South – the people, the language, the food, the land, the stories and writers that come from there – but it’s hard to know whether I’ll use it as a location again.

I love libraries, as anyone who has a brain does.

Ideas come from life: what happens in mine, what I see happening in others’, mixed with a great deal of imagination. I might see a person in a grocery store and build a whole character and life out of what’s in her basket.

I find life a mix of humor and pathos, and all my books reflect that to one degree or another.

Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone’s life.

My favorite splurge is homemade chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream or a Sausage McMuffin with egg or scalloped potatoes or turkey yanked right off the carcass and dipped in gravy or See’s chocolate.

I suppose writing nonfiction did prepare me for writing fiction. Whenever you write anything, you’re honing your skills for writing anything else.

If there were a category in the Olympics for laundry, my mother would have been a gold-medal winner.

Not being as self-contained as men, we need to share things: It’s almost as though you only know what you feel about things after you share them with a woman.

I have always believed in helping people whose work I admire.

Nurses don’t get paid very much. It didn’t take long to realize that I could make more as a writer. I loved nursing, but I loved writing more.

No matter what you write, you need an active imagination.

Elvis is symbolic of a lot of things, dreams coming true being one of them.

The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don’t plot them ahead of time, and I’m always surprised by things that happen in my books.

Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.

I think titles are extremely important for novels: They can set the tone, tip you off, serve as shorthand for what the essential contents are.

Writing was always a release for me, a great joy. It wasn’t work.

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.

I never was a big believer that you can teach writing per se.

When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both – I never know what’s going to happen.

In the most self-protective of ways, I don’t think about the reader when I’m writing – I just think about the story.

You should not pay too much attention to what anyone tells you, including me. It’s very, very important to follow your own map.

In this wide world, I don’t think that there’s just one person for any of us. I think we look until we find one that feels right, and oftentimes, it works out just fine.

The world of literature is so rich and so enriching. The value is inestimable of what reading does for you.

My mom used to keep all her Christmas cards in a basket bedecked with red ribbon, and I loved to look at them all and read all the letters.

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?

My characters are like my children in a way. I create them, and then I worry about them forevermore.

I think writers are born, not made.

I’ve been to Iowa many times before. You have to love Iowa, or you’re not an American.