Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are. "

Laura van den Berg

Related Quotes:

" 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

" I know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't. "

Laura van den Berg

" If you're working on a novel, whatever you do, don't say, 'I am almost finished with my novel.' It's worse than chanting Bloody Mary three times in front of a mirror. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Since childhood, I've been a fan of mysteries - 'Nancy Drew' lovers unite! - but 'Vertigo' struck me as an entirely new take on the genre. "

Laura van den Berg

" Holy cow - everything about writing a novel is hard for me. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, 'rate-of-revelation,' that has come to mean a lot to me: 'the pace at which we're learning crucial emotional information about the stories' central figures.' An ever-increasing rate-of-revelation is good; a stagnant r-of-r is not. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" 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

" I love noir, quite obviously. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" 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

" 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

" I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.' "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" 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

" To me, in general, something that's really rich in terms of identity about transit spaces is that they're so intimate. Especially thinking about long international flights when we're trying to sleep on the plane - we're total strangers, but we're sleeping next to each other. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" When I'm between projects, I keep a journal I call a 'thought log,' and it's my practice to write down whatever interests me. "

Laura van den Berg

" I'm such a first-person writer. "

Laura van den Berg

" Anxiety and doubt are among my biggest struggles as a writer. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" 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

" There's the public self that we present to the outer world. There's the private self, which maybe takes more time to access. But ultimately, what I'm most interested in as a writer is a few notches below the private self. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" 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

" For three years, I lived in a miniscule apartment on Beacon Street, less than a mile from the Boston Marathon explosions. "

Laura van den Berg