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" When I'm working on a short story, I could duck into a bathroom at a crowded party and write a scene, which is to say I can work in a very incremental way. "

Laura van den Berg

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" I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear. "

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

" The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" I take a pretty expansive view of craft, which is to say I don't see craft as just being technique - it's also process; subject; ideas and feelings; visions and dreams; the words that are put down and the words that are avoided. "

Laura van den Berg

" I'm pretty sure that I've never confessed in an interview my weakness for McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. The cheese is fake. Who knows what that 'fish' really is. It is gross. It is amazing. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" 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

" I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" It puzzles me when writers say they can't read fiction when they're writing fiction because they don't want to be influenced. I'm totally open to useful influence. I'm praying for it. "

Laura van den Berg

" I am temperamentally drawn to work that shoves the strange and normal against one another, it's true, although I don't see the 'strange' and the 'normal' as being two separate categories of experience; for me, they are intertwined, hard to separate. "

Laura van den Berg

" Often, contrasts bring art to life: the bright speck of paint on a dark canvas; the tightrope walk between humor and tragedy. "

Laura van den Berg

" It's not easy to craft a novel that gradually erodes the reader's comprehension of the world, of reality and identity and the passage of time. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" Children tell themselves stories, engage in self-delusion and fantasy, but those narratives are more evolving than calcified - and with that malleability comes both freedom and danger. "

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

" I think where a writer falls on the realism/non-realism continuum has a lot to do with their sight, as in, 'This is how I see the world.' And it seems my sight is off-kilter and kind of strange, but I come by that naturally; I'm not consciously pushing toward a particular point on the continuum. "

Laura van den Berg

" Whether it's via the monstrous or the paranormal, horror actually can really get at some of the most fundamental human questions. "

Laura van den Berg

" America loves a good comeback story! "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

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

Laura van den Berg

" I tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways. "

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