Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

When you have that deep kind of hunger that is part longing, what's better to eat than the best apple pie? Or the best potato salad and guacamole? Or the best deviled eggs and crab cakes and white chocolate raspberry pie?

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

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
Elizabeth Berg

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.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

If I could say anything to aspiring writers, it's to keep your own counsel, first and foremost.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

When I lived alone in Chicago, I had a lot of loneliness issues.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

It usually takes about a year to write each book. I don't plan it that way. I don't set deadlines. If a book wants to take longer, it can.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

I don't have a medicine cabinet.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

I don't really like questions about the writing process, because the truth is I don't know how I write.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

No matter what you write, you need an active imagination.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

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.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

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.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

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

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

If I could visit dead authors, I'd head right over to E. B. White, though I'm so in awe of him I'd probably just sit at his feet and weep. He's the master of clarity, of understated humor, of palatable political conviction.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

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.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

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.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

For me as a writer, it's so joyful to know that someone hears and responds to what I write.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

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

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

I can't decide if I'm a hippie or elegant older woman, a farmer's wife, a crazy person.

Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth Berg

Really, my sacred place is my study where there are books that I love and things that people have given me.