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" My favorite splurge is homemade chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream or a Sausage McMuffin with egg or scalloped potatoes or turkey yanked right off the carcass and dipped in gravy or See's chocolate. "

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" 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

" It is one thing to see your friend dance around a table when she's 25, quite another thing to see her doing it when she's 62. "

" As for my 'real life,' yes, I do have friends who are different from me, and I find it refreshing being around them. "

" Nurses don't get paid very much. It didn't take long to realize that I could make more as a writer. I loved nursing, but I loved writing more. "

" I've been to Iowa many times before. You have to love Iowa, or you're not an American. "

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

" No matter what you write, you need an active imagination. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Everybody knows the mother-daughter relationship is one of the most complex there is. "

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

" It is a happy day when I am asked to publicly recommend a book. It is also a dilemma. When I consider all the books I have loved and depended upon and profited from, how can I pick just one? "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" When you've written long enough, you see that there's a common theme in your work. "

" 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. "

" My characters are like my children in a way. I create them, and then I worry about them forevermore. "

" The friends in my real life do tend to be smart and funny and creative. I am lucky! "

" I don't have a medicine cabinet. "

Elizabeth Berg

Cabinet

Medicine

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

" Ultimately, the less I know about what I'm doing, the better the work is. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You should not pay too much attention to what anyone tells you, including me. It's very, very important to follow your own map. "

" 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. "

" I think Chicago is the best city in the country, hands down, but I don't like the winter there anymore. "

" 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. "