Quotes from Elizabeth Berg

In writing a novel about George Sand, I hoped to present her as the talented, beguiling, complicated and occasionally infuriating woman I think she was, but I hope, too, that readers will enjoy the people she surrounded herself with.

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.

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.

I suppose writing nonfiction did prepare me for writing fiction. Whenever you write anything, you're honing your skills for writing anything else.

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.

No matter what kind of writing you do, it's always the details that make the story.

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.

My inside self and my outside self used to match. A compass needle pointed true north. Now the needle spins around and around indicating the sad direction of nowhere.

The seasons tell us, everything in organic life tells us, that there is no holding on; still, we try to do just that. Sometimes, though, we learn the kind of wisdom that celebrates the open hand.

I will come back as a little breeze. You will feel me on your face, and you will know that I am still listening. So you can still talk to me.

In this wide world, I don't think that there's just one person for any of us. I think we look until we find one that feels right, and oftentimes, it works out just fine.

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.

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

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

I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life.

We are assumed to be rather hopeless - swallowed up by incorrect notions, divorced from the original genius with which we are born, lost within days of living this distracting life.

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

Everybody complains about getting older, but I find it such a rich time of life. There are negative things about it, I suppose, but more than that, I'm finding it to be a very positive experience in which growth suggests itself in a much more alluring way than it did when I was young - isn't that funny?

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.

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

I think Chicago is the best city in the country, hands down, but I don't like the winter there anymore.

There is incredible value in being of service to others. I think if most of the people in therapy offices were dragged out to put their finger in a dike, take up their place in a working line, they would be relieved of terrible burdens.

There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.

I hadn't realized how much I'd been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to.