Top 66 Laura van den Berg Quotes

When I first left Florida for Boston, I was so eager to shed my Floridian identity, perhaps some of my earlier surreal gestures felt hollow and unconvincing because they were not rising from the particular brand of the uncanny I knew best.

I’ve always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling.

In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface.

In ‘The Third Hotel,’ my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She’s trying to make sense of her husband’s death, how someone’s life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life.

Florida is a most unusual place. It can feel at once stifling and like anything is possible there.

When I’m between projects, I keep a journal I call a ‘thought log,’ and it’s my practice to write down whatever interests me.

Publishing at a young age is not really an indicator of talent.

When I’m working on a short story, I could duck into a bathroom at a crowded party and write a scene, which is to say I can work in a very incremental way.

I tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways.

If we can think of a place, the physicality of a place, as a kind of ‘material,’ I would say the landscape of Florida in particular was especially important while writing ‘Isle.’

I realized that, for me, travel for work – I’m not speaking so much about travel for pleasure – had actually become a way of avoiding life.

I was born and raised in Orlando, where the economy and culture has been powerfully shaped by tourism, and so I’ve long been interested in how we narrate the places we visit, how the gap between what we see and what we know manifests when we’re traveling.

To me, in general, something that’s really rich in terms of identity about transit spaces is that they’re so intimate. Especially thinking about long international flights when we’re trying to sleep on the plane – we’re total strangers, but we’re sleeping next to each other.

In terms of specific cinematic influences, certainly I’d recommend ‘Juan de los Muertos,’ and I also really love this French zombie movie – ‘Les Revenants’ – where the dead reanimate for no apparent reason.

I think writing, or any form of art-making, is a way to prepare for not being here. Not that we can. No amount of preparing can really ready us, in a meaningful way, for the great void that awaits us all.

I lived in Florida until I was 22.

I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn’t have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work.

As for me, I was a lonely kid, with few close friends until I was an adult – even when I might have been perceived as being on the inside, I felt like I was on the outside, kind of like viewing the world through a sheet of glass.

I think that one thing about teaching is you’re trying to communicate your thoughts about a work to a group of people who may or may not share that sentiment. This has forced me to become a lot more articulate about what I respond to and what I don’t respond to in fiction.

Being scared by a movie offers a safe catharsis, because the terror is confined to the screen. It’s an adrenalin spike, and when I come back down, I feel a bit more leveled.

A collection is, by my lights, a chance to build a universe, an overarching ecosystem. But it’s common enough to encounter a hodgepodge instead, where flashes of brilliance are undercut by clunkers.

Here’s something a little more personal: In my teens, I was having a hard time and ended up in a therapy group of young women, some of whom had endured terrible childhood traumas.

When I was in grad school, my husband and I used to house sit for a couple in Harvard Square, so we have these amazing memories of great Cambridge summers.

The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present.

When I’m absorbed in a work of fiction, time and place melts away, as though I’ve drifted away from my usual reality and been absorbed into another.

If you’re working on a novel, whatever you do, don’t say, ‘I am almost finished with my novel.’ It’s worse than chanting Bloody Mary three times in front of a mirror.

I think we’re often guilty of gravitating towards the familiar. Even if we recognize that certain patterns are unsatisfying and destructive, there can still be a comfort in the familiar recognition of a cycle repeating itself.

Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I’m feeling despairing about writing is to write.

As a teenager, I struggled a lot, had several major depressive episodes, and ended up dropping out of high school and getting a GED.

Youth is such a fascinating and volatile concoction of vulnerability, dependence, restlessness, relentlessness. You’re still learning the terms of the world and of the self, in a very immediate way.

I am temperamentally drawn to work that shoves the strange and normal against one another, it’s true, although I don’t see the ‘strange’ and the ‘normal’ as being two separate categories of experience; for me, they are intertwined, hard to separate.

I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work’s DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you.

I wager we have a vast amount of literature out there that tends to the stories of men, so I’ve never really worried too much about attending to stories of women.

I think where a writer falls on the realism/non-realism continuum has a lot to do with their sight, as in, ‘This is how I see the world.’ And it seems my sight is off-kilter and kind of strange, but I come by that naturally; I’m not consciously pushing toward a particular point on the continuum.

As a young writer, I was sort of sailing around trying to ‘find my voice’ – for lack of a better term – and I was really chafing against the very minimal brand of domestic realism that I’d read so much of in college.

I teach fiction in my workshops, and some of the readings could be classified as horror. For example, ‘House Taken Over,’ a short story by Julio Cortazar, is a work I regularly teach.

Florida is a very idiosyncratic place in a lot of ways – as are many parts of our fine country, but one could say Florida is particularly idiosyncratic.

I’ve always been most drawn to fiction that wrestles with that death-fear. Sometimes I joke with my students, ‘If no one is in danger of dying, I’m not interested,’ but of course I’m not really joking.

On my first trip to Havana, I was stopped by a woman who turned out to be a Canadian tour guide and who had mistaken me for a woman who had been part of one of her tour groups.

In the world of the American creative writing workshop, I’ve encountered teachers who are tempted to place, or have actually placed, a moratorium on child narrators. Students love to write them, but children come laden with complications.

Normally I’m the type who wouldn’t bail on a responsibility unless dead on the side of the road, and I believe deeply in the importance of continuing to follow our own paths.

With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings.

The kind of dystopian books that I’ve always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that’s less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different.

I have no problem quitting things, because I have a horror of boredom.

As a reader, I appreciate a world that feels unsettled and also visceral, inhabitable, so that’s a quality I try and bring to my own work. In this way, dislocation and precision make total sense to me as a unit.

I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way.

I love Javier Marias; I love his novel ‘Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.’

I do not work well when I am in living in a cyclone of panic. I reject actively seeking out destabilization and suffering as a creative model.

It’s not easy to craft a novel that gradually erodes the reader’s comprehension of the world, of reality and identity and the passage of time.

Children tell themselves stories, engage in self-delusion and fantasy, but those narratives are more evolving than calcified – and with that malleability comes both freedom and danger.

It puzzles me when writers say they can’t read fiction when they’re writing fiction because they don’t want to be influenced. I’m totally open to useful influence. I’m praying for it.

If I’m really rolling with a short story, I work on it everywhere and end up with a finished draft in a couple months, but a novel really demands that I step out of my life and vanish into the world of the book.

I love noir, quite obviously.

Children exist in the worlds that adults create for them, both locally and globally, and their options are, by virtue of age, often painfully limited.