Elizabeth Berg Quotes

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

It got to the point where most of my time went toward writing novels. I would still occasionally write short stories, but only when I was commissioned by an editor to write for a themed anthology or special issue.

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

I've always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since '91.

I finished my first novel - it was around 300 pages long - when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn't sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I tried what was, in my mind, a sequel. Wrote that when I was 20, and that one made it.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.

I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever - was write novels.

Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do.

I've always wanted to be a writer, and I've kept journals since I was eight years old.

The stuff I'm passionate about is what I write; it isn't multi-million-dollar franchise movies.

I've been writing fiction since I was a kid. From the age of 15 to 25, I probably wrote more than 50 short stories, one of which was published in 'The Paris Review' in 1989.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

Every 'Observer' writer wants to be a novelist.

I had a vision of myself as a novelist because that was where I could be serious. I couldn't with music.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

I find myself really feeling like it's possible that maybe the greater contribution I'm going to be able to make through this next phase of my life might be as a writer writing wonderful parts for women, or even writing wonderful parts for myself, you know?

I'm a compulsive storyteller, an avid reader, and have always nurtured the secret goal of spending my life as a writer.

Writing is hard work, but a lot of fun, too. It allows me to live out some of my fantasies.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing.

'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.

I'm not sure if I always wanted to be a writer, but I was always writing.

Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen.

I've written a lot of prose. I just haven't published it.