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" I can't decide if I'm a hippie or elegant older woman, a farmer's wife, a crazy person. "
Elizabeth Berg
Farmer
Crazy
Wife
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" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Humor
White
Political
" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Need
Story
Write
" If there were a category in the Olympics for laundry, my mother would have been a gold-medal winner. "
Elizabeth Berg
Mother
Olympics
Laundry
" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Child
Time
Single
" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Red
Mom
Loved
" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Character
Great
Life
" Writing is, of course, a solitary occupation. But for many writers, myself included, it's through writing that we make certain vital connections. "
Elizabeth Berg
Writing
Myself
Connections
" I just cannot stand an unmade bed. "
Elizabeth Berg
Stand
Cannot
Bed
" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Ahead
Time
Process
" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Off
Think
Tone
" Life is so fragile, so brief. And we seemingly work so hard at trying to ignore that. "
Elizabeth Berg
Hard
Life
Work
" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Nuts
Land
Food
" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Mother
Who
She
" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Always
Head
Off
" When I lived alone in Chicago, I had a lot of loneliness issues. "
Elizabeth Berg
Lot
Loneliness
Alone
" I loved the 'Three Stooges.' I still do - nyuk, nyuk. "
Elizabeth Berg
Three
Still
Loved
" I suppose writing nonfiction did prepare me for writing fiction. Whenever you write anything, you're honing your skills for writing anything else. "
Elizabeth Berg
Prepare
Me
Skills
" I never was a big believer that you can teach writing per se. "
Elizabeth Berg
You
Big
Never
" 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
" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Where
Club
Book
" As for my 'real life,' yes, I do have friends who are different from me, and I find it refreshing being around them. "
Elizabeth Berg
Friends
Real Life
Life
" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Reading
You
Best
" I love to listen to people talk, especially when they're being really honest and they're not trying to sound any particular way. "
Elizabeth Berg
People
Love
Talk
" Writing was always a release for me, a great joy. It wasn't work. "
Elizabeth Berg
Joy
Great
Always
" I have always believed in helping people whose work I admire. "
Elizabeth Berg
Always
Whose
Work
" When I look at my own work, I see love, loss, and loneliness. Part of it might be that I was an army brat. I moved around all the time. There was a sense of nothing being permanent. "
Elizabeth Berg
Look
Loneliness
Work
" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Kind
Like
Book
" 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
Me
" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Heart
Truth
Soul
" 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. "
Elizabeth Berg
Work
Great
Reading