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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" People don't take you seriously, so you have to take yourself seriously. "

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

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

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

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

" If I'm on the road for Random House, I'm presenting a book with the hope people will buy it. "

" 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. "

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

" We're such imperfect beings. I think that's more often the case than not. "

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

" The world of literature is so rich and so enriching. The value is inestimable of what reading does for you. "

" 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. "

" One of the great pleasures in writing 'The Dream Lover' was learning about some of the real people who populated George Sand's life. What a cast of characters! And what a pleasure to recreate them upon the page! "

" 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 think writers are born, not made. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads. "

Elizabeth Berg

Where

Just

" For me as a writer, it's so joyful to know that someone hears and responds to what I write. "

" 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. "

" I never meant to write about the experience of losing a good friend to breast cancer when I was going through it. But after it was over, I realized that although something deeply sad had happened, something truly beautiful also had. "

" 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. "

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

" In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story. "

" 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

Book

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

" 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. "