ELIZABETH BERG

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

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.

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

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.

I hope to show the great worth of women. So far as I'm concerned, we're still underappreciated.

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

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 have always believed in helping people whose work I admire.

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

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.

When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads.

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

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

It is a happy day when I am asked to publicly recommend a book. It is also a dilemma. When I consider all the books I have loved and depended upon and profited from, how can I pick just one?

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

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

Nurses don't get paid very much. It didn't take long to realize that I could make more as a writer. I loved nursing, but I loved writing more.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I don't have a medicine cabinet.

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

My characters are like my children in a way. I create them, and then I worry about them forevermore.