Elizabeth Berg Quotes

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what's going to happen in my life.

I've made up stuff that's turned out to be real, that's the spooky part.

I walked the streets of New York; I would feel the presence of Daredevil. I would see him up on the rooftop. What you are doing in your life, you start to see in your book. It all starts to merge together.

Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.

What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.

I actually have a weird tendency to say things to people that they were just about to say. I always freak my best friend out with that. So I might have a bit of psychic power.

I write stories that are already in the air, and I think it's important to have the correct listening device to tune in to that frequency.

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

I went to Colby College in Waterville, ME and did picture it when I was writing 'Cum Laude.' So many of the physical details were included, like the loop where people jogged. The story of the chapel is also borrowed from Colby... but the students and cast of characters are fictional.

I say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens.

Sometimes I write about things that never happened to me that wind up happening to me. When you put things out in the universe, sometimes they wind up coming true.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

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.

Though my stories aren't autobiographical, I do sometimes use things from my life.

Things tend to come when they are meant to come. I know that sounds kind of like spiritual and cheesy, but I think things come when they're meant to come.

I'm always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they're not. I can't choose any one scene and say, 'Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!' I just use little snippets of things as a starting point!

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction.

I guess I see a part of myself in everyone I write about. I tend to write about kids who are obsessed with something, and even though I have never been good with machines the way Hugo is, I did love miniature things when I was a kid.

In the broad sense, as a processing of everything one hears or witnesses, all fiction is autobiographical - imagination ground through the mill of memory. It's impossible to separate the two ingredients.

Everything is personal - the poems and the crime novels. I have never been involved in any murders, but there are strong autobiographical elements in each.

Often, I dream about work. For instance, the night before the Oscars, I dreamt about the Oscars and I dreamt about who I wanted to interview. Interestingly, one of the people I really wanted to interview was Keanu Reeves, and then we got him. We had never interviewed him before, so that was lucky. Or maybe it was fate - I don't know.