Elizabeth Berg Quotes

I can't talk about anything or write about anything if I don't understand it. So a lot of the stuff that I go through and a lot of the time that I spend is understanding.

I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

Writing isn't necessarily about what one knows but what one wants to know.

I kind of do all of this writing as a way of thinking and learning. I'm sure it's similar to being a journalist: You get to learn, and that's the greatest kind of job.

Sometimes writing it is a good way to understand something.

You have to have some kind of clarity or understanding of what's happening to write.

I think that's one of the most important things that books do: not to teach you anything, but to help you teach yourself by just being in the world of the book and having your own thoughts and reactions and noticing your own reactions and thoughts and learning about yourself that way.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

Read as much as you can, and then sit down and write.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

I was always an outsider, always standing outside, observing and trying to figure things out. Which is exactly what you need to do as a writer, I suppose.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.

I write books to find out about things.

Anyone who doesn't read doesn't have any business writing.

Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

Words build bridges into unexplored regions.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.

Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.

The more I read, the more I realise what I don't know.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.