Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" I think my concern is I know my voice, and I know the kinds of landscapes that interest me, so my primary concern is doing the most I can with those voices and those landscapes. "
Laura van den Berg
I Can
Voice
Think
" 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
" Normally I'm the type who wouldn't bail on a responsibility unless dead on the side of the road, and I believe deeply in the importance of continuing to follow our own paths. "
Laura van den Berg
Believe
Road
Responsibility
" 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
" I think we're often guilty of gravitating towards the familiar. Even if we recognize that certain patterns are unsatisfying and destructive, there can still be a comfort in the familiar recognition of a cycle repeating itself. "
Laura van den Berg
Think
Recognition
Guilty
" 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
" If I leave the fictional world for too long, it's a bit like stepping through a portal, entering another reality, and then not knowing how to get back to where you were before. "
Laura van den Berg
Not Knowing
World
Reality
" If we can think of a place, the physicality of a place, as a kind of 'material,' I would say the landscape of Florida in particular was especially important while writing 'Isle.' "
Laura van den Berg
Landscape
Place
Writing
" Florida is a most unusual place. It can feel at once stifling and like anything is possible there. "
Laura van den Berg
Anything Is Possible
Place
Like
" I've had a somewhat typical experience in that many of the contemporary writers I was exposed to early on were white and often male. "
Laura van den Berg
Early
Exposed
Many
" I think my favorite horror films are really grounded in human psychology, which is to say I think through sort of extreme dislocations of reality. "
Laura van den Berg
Think
Horror
Human
" The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different. "
Laura van den Berg
Yourself
Kind
You
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I love creating mysteries, but I am terrible at solving them. "
Laura van den Berg
I Am
Creating
Am
" 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
" In 'The Third Hotel,' my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She's trying to make sense of her husband's death, how someone's life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life. "
Laura van den Berg
Hotel
Trying
She
" 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 think writing, or any form of art-making, is a way to prepare for not being here. Not that we can. No amount of preparing can really ready us, in a meaningful way, for the great void that awaits us all. "
Laura van den Berg
Think
Way
Writing
" Being scared by a movie offers a safe catharsis, because the terror is confined to the screen. It's an adrenalin spike, and when I come back down, I feel a bit more leveled. "
Laura van den Berg
More
Back
Down
" 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
" In terms of specific cinematic influences, certainly I'd recommend 'Juan de los Muertos,' and I also really love this French zombie movie - 'Les Revenants' - where the dead reanimate for no apparent reason. "
Laura van den Berg
Love
Dead
Where
" If I'm really rolling with a short story, I work on it everywhere and end up with a finished draft in a couple months, but a novel really demands that I step out of my life and vanish into the world of the book. "
Laura van den Berg
Life
World
Work
" 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 was born and raised in Orlando, where the economy and culture has been powerfully shaped by tourism, and so I've long been interested in how we narrate the places we visit, how the gap between what we see and what we know manifests when we're traveling. "
Laura van den Berg
Culture
Born
Know
" The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are. "
Laura van den Berg
Short
Long
Here