Elizabeth Berg Quotes

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

Writing a book for me, I expect, is very similar to the experience of reading the book for my readers.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

The first book I sat down to write was an historical romance. It was really bad and thankfully no one ever saw it.

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.