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" You need a place to work that works for you, and you need people to understand that when you are writing, you are doing a rarefied type of brain surgery and therefore should not be subject to a million random interruptions. "

Elizabeth Berg

Brain

People

Work

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Writers have a reputation for being distracted. That's because writers are distracted. They are always tuned into that other voice, the one in their head that rarely turns off. "

" I love to listen to people talk, especially when they're being really honest and they're not trying to sound any particular way. "

" Every book is its own experience, the writing of it. "

" No, I am not my mother. I am deeply, endlessly grateful for what she did and who she was, but I am a different kind of person. "

" I love libraries, as anyone who has a brain does. "

" Some people read an interesting or provocative newspaper article, and that's the end of that. A writer reads such an article, and her imagination gets fired up. Questions occur to her. She might feel an urge to finish the story that the article suggests. "

" I got married at twenty-five and had children right away, so I didn't have the worry that I would never get to have children. "

" 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. "

" I think it's harder - much harder - to be a good parent than to write a book. "

" As a child, I saw my mother prepare for Christmas every year, and it never occurred to me that labor was involved. I thought it was my mother's joy and privilege to hang tinsel on the tree strand by strand, to make sure that every room in the house had a touch of Christmas, down to the Santa-themed rug and hand towels in the bathroom. "

Elizabeth Berg

Thought

Mother

" We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading. "

" It feels like my books come true. I write these things, and then they kind of end up happening. I wasn't divorced, for example, when I wrote a book about divorce. "

Elizabeth Berg

Kind

Book

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

" I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy. "

" If I'm on the road for Random House, I'm presenting a book with the hope people will buy it. "

" I loved the 'Three Stooges.' I still do - nyuk, nyuk. "

" I'm nuts about the South - the people, the language, the food, the land, the stories and writers that come from there - but it's hard to know whether I'll use it as a location again. "

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

" When I look at my own work, I see love, loss, and loneliness. Part of it might be that I was an army brat. I moved around all the time. There was a sense of nothing being permanent. "

" 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. "

" Oftentimes, I need to write about something in order to understand it. "

" I think titles are extremely important for novels: They can set the tone, tip you off, serve as shorthand for what the essential contents are. "

" I don't have a medicine cabinet. "

Elizabeth Berg

Cabinet

Medicine

" Sometimes the best reading comes just by accident. Someone talks about a book, or you're just wandering the stacks in the library, and you find a book that you love. "

" 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. "

" I've always felt an overwhelming need to get out what was inside. The vehicle for me was words on paper - not speech, not art, not dance, not anything else. "

" Writing is, of course, a solitary occupation. But for many writers, myself included, it's through writing that we make certain vital connections. "