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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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" 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

Worry

Away

Got

" 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. "

" As for the notion that everything has already been said, maybe it has, but life is like meatloaf: there are so many different ways to present it. "

Elizabeth Berg

Present

Said

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I think conflict is one of the things that makes for a good story. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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? "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I think writers are born, not made. "

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

" I don't have a medicine cabinet. "

Elizabeth Berg

Cabinet

Medicine

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

" 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. "

" 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

Thought

Mother

" Sometimes the best reading comes just by accident. Someone talks about a book, or you're just wandering the stacks in the library, and you find a book that you love. "

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

" 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. "