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

Elizabeth Berg

Everyone

You

Life

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

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

" I think writers are born, not made. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" No matter what kind of writing you do, it's always the details that make the story. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I wrote 'Home Safe,' I wanted to look at a number of things: the mystery and joy and pain of creativity. What happens when a vital safety net is suddenly removed. The difficulty some people have in growing up. The way a deep love can be as crippling as it is satisfying. But mostly, I wanted to look at the mother-daughter relationship. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I tend not to write books that are really, really long, and I'm also a pretty fast writer. "

" Some people read an interesting or provocative newspaper article, and that's the end of that. A writer reads such an article, and her imagination gets fired up. Questions occur to her. She might feel an urge to finish the story that the article suggests. "

" I think it's harder - much harder - to be a good parent than to write a book. "

" Life is so fragile, so brief. And we seemingly work so hard at trying to ignore that. "

" If I don't feel like writing on a certain day, I just go to the cafe and hang around. "

" 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. "

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

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