Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present. "
Laura van den Berg
Present
Past
Wound
Related Quotes:
" Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I'm feeling despairing about writing is to write. "
Laura van den Berg
About
Feeling
Write
" 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
" I think that one thing about teaching is you're trying to communicate your thoughts about a work to a group of people who may or may not share that sentiment. This has forced me to become a lot more articulate about what I respond to and what I don't respond to in fiction. "
Laura van den Berg
Me
You
Work
" America loves a good comeback story! "
Laura van den Berg
Comeback
Story
Good
" 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
" 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
" Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers. "
Laura van den Berg
Teachers
Through
Me
" In the world of the American creative writing workshop, I've encountered teachers who are tempted to place, or have actually placed, a moratorium on child narrators. Students love to write them, but children come laden with complications. "
Laura van den Berg
World
Child
Children
" 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
" To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills. "
Laura van den Berg
Memory
Think
Degree
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I'm such a first-person writer. "
Laura van den Berg
First-Person
Writer
" I teach fiction in my workshops, and some of the readings could be classified as horror. For example, 'House Taken Over,' a short story by Julio Cortazar, is a work I regularly teach. "
Laura van den Berg
Teach
House
Horror
" On my first trip to Havana, I was stopped by a woman who turned out to be a Canadian tour guide and who had mistaken me for a woman who had been part of one of her tour groups. "
Laura van den Berg
Woman
First
Havana
" 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
" In the novels I most admire, there is this sense that, within the confines of the world, the possibilities are always opening in new and surprising ways - that was a quality I strived to capture, with the hope that the reader would be willing to follow me. "
Laura van den Berg
World
Possibilities
Quality
" 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
" 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
" The moment when my husband and I clasped hands and turned from our officiant, newly wed, was the most light-filled of my life. "
Laura van den Berg
My Life
Life
Moment
" When I was in grad school, my husband and I used to house sit for a couple in Harvard Square, so we have these amazing memories of great Cambridge summers. "
Laura van den Berg
Great
House
Memories
" In August 2008, I moved with the man who would become my husband from Boston to a cabin in rural North Carolina. "
Laura van den Berg
Man
Husband
Cabin
" I do not work well when I am in living in a cyclone of panic. I reject actively seeking out destabilization and suffering as a creative model. "
Laura van den Berg
Living
Creative
Work
" 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
" Culturally, there is often the expectation that women should be repelled by anything too ugly, too violent. "
Laura van den Berg
Anything
Ugly
Expectation
" I have no problem quitting things, because I have a horror of boredom. "
Laura van den Berg
Problem
Things
Boredom
" 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
" Here's something a little more personal: In my teens, I was having a hard time and ended up in a therapy group of young women, some of whom had endured terrible childhood traumas. "
Laura van den Berg
Time
Childhood
Young