Quotes from Elizabeth Berg

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

The process of writing and creating and answering that very unique call inside yourself has nothing to do with agents and sales and all that stuff.

I do think that there's an art form to parenting, and I have nothing but admiration for those who do it well.

When I wrote 'Home Safe,' I wanted to look at a number of things: the mystery and joy and pain of creativity. What happens when a vital safety net is suddenly removed. The difficulty some people have in growing up. The way a deep love can be as crippling as it is satisfying. But mostly, I wanted to look at the mother-daughter relationship.

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

Not being as self-contained as men, we need to share things: It's almost as though you only know what you feel about things after you share them with a woman.

I never was a big believer that you can teach writing per se.

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.

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.

I don't have a medicine cabinet.

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

My mom used to keep all her Christmas cards in a basket bedecked with red ribbon, and I loved to look at them all and read all the letters.

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.

The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don't plot them ahead of time, and I'm always surprised by things that happen in my books.

There are moments when we think nature happens just for us, and there are other moments when the ridiculousness of that notion is revealed.

Elvis is symbolic of a lot of things, dreams coming true being one of them.

I made cranberry sauce, and when it was done put it into a dark blue bowl for the beautiful contrast. I was thinking, doing this, about the old ways of gratitude: Indians thanking the deer they'd slain, grace before supper, kneeling before bed. I was thinking that gratitude is too much absent in our lives now, and we need it back, even if it only takes the form of acknowledging the blue of a bowl against the red of cranberries.

You don't get everything all at once. You wait.

People say you should give until it hurts. I say you should give until it stops hurting. Know what I mean?

The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their petals loose about them. The shouts of children at play in the neighborhood, Ginger Rogers on the black-and-white screen.

I like to listen to sad music when I'm sad. It seems honest. It makes me cry, and sometimes a good cry is the only thing that can make you feel better.

I felt myself trapped in line for a ride I was not nearly ready for, looking back but moving forward in the only direction I could go.

It is such a terrifying thing to see a man cry.

What is it that makes a family? Certainly no document does, no legal pronouncement or accident of birth. No, real families come from choices we make about who we want to be bound to, and the ties to such families live in our hearts.