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" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Time
Easy
Identity
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
True
Experience
I Am
" 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 know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't. "
Laura van den Berg
Million
Know
Ideas
" To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills. "
Laura van den Berg
Memory
Think
Degree
" 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
" Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I'm feeling despairing about writing is to write. "
Laura van den Berg
About
Feeling
Write
" 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
" In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface. "
Laura van den Berg
Rise
Fiction
Social
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Great
House
Memories
" I think, in a lot of ways, if you really strip down some of the most compelling novels, in a lot of ways, they're detective stories. "
Laura van den Berg
Down
You
Think
" I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear. "
Laura van den Berg
Hear
I Am
Am
" In August 2008, I moved with the man who would become my husband from Boston to a cabin in rural North Carolina. "
Laura van den Berg
Man
Husband
Cabin
" I take a pretty expansive view of craft, which is to say I don't see craft as just being technique - it's also process; subject; ideas and feelings; visions and dreams; the words that are put down and the words that are avoided. "
Laura van den Berg
Ideas
Dreams
Words
" Since childhood, I've been a fan of mysteries - 'Nancy Drew' lovers unite! - but 'Vertigo' struck me as an entirely new take on the genre. "
Laura van den Berg
Fan
Childhood
New
" 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 tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways. "
Laura van den Berg
Unexpected
Rule
Followers
" 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
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
You
World
Learning
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Pleasure
Way
Work
" Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms. "
Laura van den Berg
Truth
Create
Kind
" 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
" I lived in Florida until I was 22. "
Laura van den Berg
Florida
Lived
Until
" I'm such a first-person writer. "
Laura van den Berg
First-Person
Writer
" 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
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Time
Childhood
Young
" My students are often asking me, 'What do you think are the most important qualities for a writer?' And one thing I always tells them is that it's helpful to be willing to sit in a space of uncertainty. There are entire years, especially with novels, where you really don't know where the project is going. "
Laura van den Berg
You
Uncertainty
Think
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Woman
First
Havana
" I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.' "
Laura van den Berg
Me
Battle
Think
" Not long after watching 'The Passenger,' I wrote the first lines of 'The Isle of Youth,' which concerns twin sisters who swap identities and become ensnared in the Miami underworld. "
Laura van den Berg
Youth
Become
Watching