When you have that deep kind of hunger that is part longing, what's better to eat than the best apple pie? Or the best potato salad and guacamole? Or the best deviled eggs and crab cakes and white chocolate raspberry pie?
Elizabeth Berg
You need a place to work that works for you, and you need people to understand that when you are writing, you are doing a rarefied type of brain surgery and therefore should not be subject to a million random interruptions.
I think it's harder - much harder - to be a good parent than to write a book.
My favorite splurge is homemade chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream or a Sausage McMuffin with egg or scalloped potatoes or turkey yanked right off the carcass and dipped in gravy or See's chocolate.
I know that sometimes it happens that a novelist is embarrassed about their early works. For me, it's the opposite: I believe 'Durable Goods' is the best thing I've written.
I'm nuts about the South - the people, the language, the food, the land, the stories and writers that come from there - but it's hard to know whether I'll use it as a location again.
I look to find the heart and soul of people, of my characters. I look for the truth of them and the truths about life that are presented through them.
If I don't feel like writing on a certain day, I just go to the cafe and hang around.
I don't really like questions about the writing process, because the truth is I don't know how I write.
Life is so fragile, so brief. And we seemingly work so hard at trying to ignore that.
As for my 'real life,' yes, I do have friends who are different from me, and I find it refreshing being around them.
I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy.
I can't decide if I'm a hippie or elegant older woman, a farmer's wife, a crazy person.
I have not been in a book club where there were any men, and I have not, in fact, heard of book groups that were mixed.
A ritual or tradition can be as simple as something you do every night, like read a story to a small child, or something you do weekly, such as go out for Chinese food.
I'm the kind of person who is entertained watching someone simply be themselves, whether they're putting their children to bed or making dinner or sitting at the table reading the morning newspaper.
We're such imperfect beings. I think that's more often the case than not.
I do think that there's an art form to parenting, and I have nothing but admiration for those who do it well.
In this wide world, I don't think that there's just one person for any of us. I think we look until we find one that feels right, and oftentimes, it works out just fine.
No matter what you write, you need an active imagination.
Elvis is symbolic of a lot of things, dreams coming true being one of them.
Some people read an interesting or provocative newspaper article, and that's the end of that. A writer reads such an article, and her imagination gets fired up. Questions occur to her. She might feel an urge to finish the story that the article suggests.
Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.
If I could say anything to aspiring writers, it's to keep your own counsel, first and foremost.
When I lived alone in Chicago, I had a lot of loneliness issues.
It usually takes about a year to write each book. I don't plan it that way. I don't set deadlines. If a book wants to take longer, it can.
I don't have a medicine cabinet.
We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading.
Writing is, of course, a solitary occupation. But for many writers, myself included, it's through writing that we make certain vital connections.
If I could visit dead authors, I'd head right over to E. B. White, though I'm so in awe of him I'd probably just sit at his feet and weep. He's the master of clarity, of understated humor, of palatable political conviction.
Writers have a reputation for being distracted. That's because writers are distracted. They are always tuned into that other voice, the one in their head that rarely turns off.
I got married at twenty-five and had children right away, so I didn't have the worry that I would never get to have children.
For me as a writer, it's so joyful to know that someone hears and responds to what I write.
I love libraries, as anyone who has a brain does.
Really, my sacred place is my study where there are books that I love and things that people have given me.
I just cannot stand an unmade bed.
Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.
When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads.
When I look at my own work, I see love, loss, and loneliness. Part of it might be that I was an army brat. I moved around all the time. There was a sense of nothing being permanent.
I never was a big believer that you can teach writing per se.
When I lived in Boston, I had an office that I rented because I found it wonderful to go away from my house to work: It was so quiet, and I couldn't go to the refrigerator or do the laundry.
In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.
I love to listen to people talk, especially when they're being really honest and they're not trying to sound any particular way.
I have always believed in helping people whose work I admire.
As for the notion that everything has already been said, maybe it has, but life is like meatloaf: there are so many different ways to present it.
As a child, I saw my mother prepare for Christmas every year, and it never occurred to me that labor was involved. I thought it was my mother's joy and privilege to hang tinsel on the tree strand by strand, to make sure that every room in the house had a touch of Christmas, down to the Santa-themed rug and hand towels in the bathroom.
If there were a category in the Olympics for laundry, my mother would have been a gold-medal winner.
My mom used to keep all her Christmas cards in a basket bedecked with red ribbon, and I loved to look at them all and read all the letters.
No, I am not my mother. I am deeply, endlessly grateful for what she did and who she was, but I am a different kind of person.
It feels like my books come true. I write these things, and then they kind of end up happening. I wasn't divorced, for example, when I wrote a book about divorce.
