Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Options
Create
Age
Related Quotes:
" I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.' "
Laura van den Berg
Me
Battle
Think
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Children
Tell
Fantasy
" Like many artists, I have issues with anxiety and depression, so I try to live in a way that supports my mental health. "
Laura van den Berg
Mental Health
Depression
Health
" A sense of play is important when I'm writing, and so messing around with, say, a magic routine can feel like play, at least initially. "
Laura van den Berg
Play
Magic
Important
" Often, contrasts bring art to life: the bright speck of paint on a dark canvas; the tightrope walk between humor and tragedy. "
Laura van den Berg
Humor
Tragedy
Art
" I've had a somewhat typical experience in that many of the contemporary writers I was exposed to early on were white and often male. "
Laura van den Berg
Early
Exposed
Many
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Think
Way
Writing
" I'm such a first-person writer. "
Laura van den Berg
First-Person
Writer
" Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories. "
Laura van den Berg
Complicated
City
Many
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Life
World
Work
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Living
Creative
Work
" I think my favorite horror films are really grounded in human psychology, which is to say I think through sort of extreme dislocations of reality. "
Laura van den Berg
Think
Horror
Human
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
You
I Am
Mirror
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
World
Child
Children
" Culturally, there is often the expectation that women should be repelled by anything too ugly, too violent. "
Laura van den Berg
Anything
Ugly
Expectation
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Say
Want
Open
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Journal
Practice
Me
" I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, 'rate-of-revelation,' that has come to mean a lot to me: 'the pace at which we're learning crucial emotional information about the stories' central figures.' An ever-increasing rate-of-revelation is good; a stagnant r-of-r is not. "
Laura van den Berg
Good
Learning
Mean
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Been
Away
Reality
" Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation. "
Laura van den Berg
Talk
Memory
Manipulation
" I'm pretty sure that I've never confessed in an interview my weakness for McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. The cheese is fake. Who knows what that 'fish' really is. It is gross. It is amazing. "
Laura van den Berg
Amazing
Fake
Fish
" I have no problem quitting things, because I have a horror of boredom. "
Laura van den Berg
Problem
Things
Boredom
" If I leave the fictional world for too long, it's a bit like stepping through a portal, entering another reality, and then not knowing how to get back to where you were before. "
Laura van den Berg
Not Knowing
World
Reality
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Teach
House
Horror
" I can't write anything if I don't know where it's set, where the events are happening - even if the details of setting are minimal. "
Laura van den Berg
Anything
Events
Know
" America loves a good comeback story! "
Laura van den Berg
Comeback
Story
Good
" The moment when my husband and I clasped hands and turned from our officiant, newly wed, was the most light-filled of my life. "
Laura van den Berg
My Life
Life
Moment
" I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way. "
Laura van den Berg
Time
Way
Disappear
" We write in a culture that favors the heft of the novel. Better still if the novel in question is large enough to be wielded interchangeably as a doorstop and a weapon. "
Laura van den Berg
Question
Better
Culture
" In the novels I most admire, there is this sense that, within the confines of the world, the possibilities are always opening in new and surprising ways - that was a quality I strived to capture, with the hope that the reader would be willing to follow me. "
Laura van den Berg
World
Possibilities
Quality