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" In my own life, I have found grief to be enormously distorting, particularly if it's sudden or extreme in nature. "
Laura van den Berg
My Own
Own
Found
Related Quotes:
" 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
" I lived in Boston for three years, and during that time, I wrote my first collection of stories, 'What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us;' other stories that didn't make it into the collection; and several failed novel openings. "
Laura van den Berg
Three
Look
Boston
" 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
" 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
" As a genre, the best horror poses central human questions - Who can you trust? What is the cost of our secrets? What is our relationship to history? What are we blind to? What evils are lurking under the smooth surface of the self? - through radical dislocations. "
Laura van den Berg
Relationship
History
Best
" I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work's DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you. "
Laura van den Berg
Always
You
Work
" A collection is, by my lights, a chance to build a universe, an overarching ecosystem. But it's common enough to encounter a hodgepodge instead, where flashes of brilliance are undercut by clunkers. "
Laura van den Berg
Enough
Build
Lights
" I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn't have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work. "
Laura van den Berg
Music
Respect
Work
" When I first left Florida for Boston, I was so eager to shed my Floridian identity, perhaps some of my earlier surreal gestures felt hollow and unconvincing because they were not rising from the particular brand of the uncanny I knew best. "
Laura van den Berg
Brand
Identity
Boston
" I'm such a first-person writer. "
Laura van den Berg
First-Person
Writer
" As a reader, I appreciate a world that feels unsettled and also visceral, inhabitable, so that's a quality I try and bring to my own work. In this way, dislocation and precision make total sense to me as a unit. "
Laura van den Berg
Work
Quality
Me
" 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
" Unlike a novel, where you expect a different kind of arc that leaves us with a somber sense of resolution, I think a story in some ways as like a train window: being able to watch the landscape pass for a certain amount of time. And then your stop arrives, and you have to leave. "
Laura van den Berg
Story
Think
Time
" With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings. "
Laura van den Berg
Character
Think
Stories
" As for me, I was a lonely kid, with few close friends until I was an adult - even when I might have been perceived as being on the inside, I felt like I was on the outside, kind of like viewing the world through a sheet of glass. "
Laura van den Berg
Kid
World
Me
" 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
" Culturally, there is often the expectation that women should be repelled by anything too ugly, too violent. "
Laura van den Berg
Anything
Ugly
Expectation
" 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
" 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
" Florida is a very idiosyncratic place in a lot of ways - as are many parts of our fine country, but one could say Florida is particularly idiosyncratic. "
Laura van den Berg
Ways
Country
Place
" I know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't. "
Laura van den Berg
Million
Know
Ideas
" I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.' "
Laura van den Berg
Me
Battle
Think
" As we know all too well, our early years are formative in ways it can takes us a lifetime to grasp. Those years leave deep marks; in that way, the stakes of childhood are inherently very high. "
Laura van den Berg
Way
Leave
Childhood
" 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
" 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
" Ever since I started writing in college, I have, save for a few short breaks here and there, been working away on something. I love it, I need it, and so it never occurred to me to put writing on the back burner. "
Laura van den Berg
Love
Me
Need
" 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
" As a young writer, I was sort of sailing around trying to 'find my voice' - for lack of a better term - and I was really chafing against the very minimal brand of domestic realism that I'd read so much of in college. "
Laura van den Berg
Voice
Trying
College
" I've always been most drawn to fiction that wrestles with that death-fear. Sometimes I joke with my students, 'If no one is in danger of dying, I'm not interested,' but of course I'm not really joking. "
Laura van den Berg
Dying
Students
Always