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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Elizabeth Berg

Family

Today

People

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

" As for the notion that everything has already been said, maybe it has, but life is like meatloaf: there are so many different ways to present it. "

Elizabeth Berg

Present

Said

" Everybody complains about getting older, but I find it such a rich time of life. There are negative things about it, I suppose, but more than that, I'm finding it to be a very positive experience in which growth suggests itself in a much more alluring way than it did when I was young - isn't that funny? "

" I have always believed in helping people whose work I admire. "

" I never was a big believer that you can teach writing per se. "

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

" When I lived in Boston, I had an office that I rented because I found it wonderful to go away from my house to work: It was so quiet, and I couldn't go to the refrigerator or do the laundry. "

Elizabeth Berg

Work

Boston

" No, I never thought that I would be a writer. I had always been told I could write well, but it never occurred to me that I might make my living that way. "

Elizabeth Berg

Way

Thought

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I think conflict is one of the things that makes for a good story. "

" 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. "

" I don't really like questions about the writing process, because the truth is I don't know how I write. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

" When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both - I never know what's going to happen. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" A ritual or tradition can be as simple as something you do every night, like read a story to a small child, or something you do weekly, such as go out for Chinese food. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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