Quotes from Elizabeth Berg

Never try to copy other writers, and never try to have a formula. It has to come from your heart and soul.

I have always believed in helping people whose work I admire.

Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time.

I find life a mix of humor and pathos, and all my books reflect that to one degree or another.

As for my 'real life,' yes, I do have friends who are different from me, and I find it refreshing being around them.

When I lived in Boston, I had an office that I rented because I found it wonderful to go away from my house to work: It was so quiet, and I couldn't go to the refrigerator or do the laundry.

Writing was always a release for me, a great joy. It wasn't work.

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.

Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything.

When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.

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

Life is so fragile, so brief. And we seemingly work so hard at trying to ignore that.

We're such imperfect beings. I think that's more often the case than not.

When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both - I never know what's going to happen.

If I don't feel like writing on a certain day, I just go to the cafe and hang around.

I thought of the priest who'd told me that many religions hold that it is easier to be closely connected to people we love after death than before.

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

Traditions are the inventions of people who mean to routinely put love and comfort and meaning into their lives and in the lives of those they live with.

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

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.

The truth is, we usually only show our unhappiness to another woman. I suppose this is one of our problems. And yet it is also one of our strengths.

My mother and her five sisters have always been living examples of the great love that can exist among sisters - and in a large family.

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.

Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.