Elizabeth Berg Quotes

You should live in a manner that should enable you to devote time to writing and contemplation. As is often said, the writer is at work even when he is simply looking out the window.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Your senses are reeling all the time. Finally you find something to write and the very next day you go out and see something else which totally contradicts what you've written and every conclusion you've come to.

So, the combination of looking at lots of different people and how they react to each other and how they relate to each other and waiting for that inspiration is the thing that allows me to keep writing.

I like to go into a space, listen, absorb, and then interpret.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

When working on and writing a film, I'm often more of a sponge than other times, aware of what's going on around me.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.

[Personal life] doesn't affect my creative process. It just gives me more subjects to talk about. Basically whatever you put in your music is how you want people to view you.

Yes, I get dry spells. Sometimes I can't turn out a thing for three months. When one of those spells comes on I quit trying to work and go out and see something of life. You can't write a story that's got any life in it by sitting at a writing table and thinking. You've got to get out into the streets, into the crowds, talk with people, and feel the rush and throb of real life-that's the stimulant for a story writer.

Literally, I see my writing as transcription - a transcription of what I see, hear, think, live.

I think when you write songs, you write about people... People are the source of my material. And London is a wonderful place to be for people. So, the next time you're sitting in a park somewhere, and you see someone like me looking at you, don't phone the police. I'm just writing

I'm a writer and writers either have good memories or nothing at all.

Sometimes it bursts from your imagination fully formed, sometimes you absorb from nonfiction, sometimes you're able to imprint your own autobiographical experiences on a world you never yourself were a part of. A decent number of the one-liners in the title story originally came up in conversations with my girlfriend or my neighbor.

The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.

Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy

As for me, I rarely write a song. But when I do write a song, like "Ain't No Chimneys in the Projects," which came to me at three a.m. one morning, on a whim - I get a percentage.

My writing comes from ideas that make a sound in my heart.

When I start writing, the first line might come from reality, but the second and the third one, I have to write it. So this is the genesis of my creation. If I want to know what happens, if I want to find out the secret, I have to write it.

Everything can inspire me. I know that sounds like a cop-out answer, but I find inspiration in literally just about everything. As an actor, I have to watch people and observe their behaviors - this is how I create characters. My daily surroundings feed my work, whether it's something I'm working on right now or it's something down the road. Music, art, landscape - these are all things I draw inspiration from.

I think of a writer as a river: you reflect what passes before you.

A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.

It's hard if you're just touring constantly. It's like, "What am I going to write about? I'm in the van, I'm playing another show..." I'm still writing about heartbreak that happened years ago. I don't see the point of writing and putting out another record until I can do something else.