Top 70 Laura van den Berg Quotes

The moment when my husband and I clasped hands and turned from our officiant, newly wed, was the most light-filled of my life.

Youth is such a fascinating and volatile concoction of vulnerability, dependence, restlessness, relentlessness. You’re still learning the terms of the world and of the self, in a very immediate way.

A sense of play is important when I’m writing, and so messing around with, say, a magic routine can feel like play, at least initially.

It’s not easy to craft a novel that gradually erodes the reader’s comprehension of the world, of reality and identity and the passage of time.

I’ve always been most drawn to fiction that wrestles with that death-fear. Sometimes I joke with my students, ‘If no one is in danger of dying, I’m not interested,’ but of course I’m not really joking.

I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way.

As a young writer, I was sort of sailing around trying to ‘find my voice’ – for lack of a better term – and I was really chafing against the very minimal brand of domestic realism that I’d read so much of in college.

I think writing, or any form of art-making, is a way to prepare for not being here. Not that we can. No amount of preparing can really ready us, in a meaningful way, for the great void that awaits us all.

I love noir, quite obviously.

Anxiety and doubt are among my biggest struggles as a writer.

If I’m really rolling with a short story, I work on it everywhere and end up with a finished draft in a couple months, but a novel really demands that I step out of my life and vanish into the world of the book.

We write in a culture that favors the heft of the novel. Better still if the novel in question is large enough to be wielded interchangeably as a doorstop and a weapon.

I tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways.

I was born and raised in Orlando, where the economy and culture has been powerfully shaped by tourism, and so I’ve long been interested in how we narrate the places we visit, how the gap between what we see and what we know manifests when we’re traveling.

Normally I’m the type who wouldn’t bail on a responsibility unless dead on the side of the road, and I believe deeply in the importance of continuing to follow our own paths.

When I’m working on a short story, I could duck into a bathroom at a crowded party and write a scene, which is to say I can work in a very incremental way.

Florida is a very idiosyncratic place in a lot of ways – as are many parts of our fine country, but one could say Florida is particularly idiosyncratic.

I can’t write anything if I don’t know where it’s set, where the events are happening – even if the details of setting are minimal.

I’ve always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling.

It puzzles me when writers say they can’t read fiction when they’re writing fiction because they don’t want to be influenced. I’m totally open to useful influence. I’m praying for it.

Culturally, there is often the expectation that women should be repelled by anything too ugly, too violent.

I wager we have a vast amount of literature out there that tends to the stories of men, so I’ve never really worried too much about attending to stories of women.

The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are.

America loves a good comeback story!

I am temperamentally drawn to work that shoves the strange and normal against one another, it’s true, although I don’t see the ‘strange’ and the ‘normal’ as being two separate categories of experience; for me, they are intertwined, hard to separate.

‘Find Me’ I think, is brooding in a very literal sense of the word in that you have all of these sort of interior storm that’s growing within Joy over the course of the book and leading her to her moment. And certainly, I think there’s an aspect of the supernatural.

When I’m absorbed in a work of fiction, time and place melts away, as though I’ve drifted away from my usual reality and been absorbed into another.

I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world.

In August 2008, I moved with the man who would become my husband from Boston to a cabin in rural North Carolina.

As for me, I was a lonely kid, with few close friends until I was an adult – even when I might have been perceived as being on the inside, I felt like I was on the outside, kind of like viewing the world through a sheet of glass.

Like many artists, I have issues with anxiety and depression, so I try to live in a way that supports my mental health.

In the novels I most admire, there is this sense that, within the confines of the world, the possibilities are always opening in new and surprising ways – that was a quality I strived to capture, with the hope that the reader would be willing to follow me.

I do not work well when I am in living in a cyclone of panic. I reject actively seeking out destabilization and suffering as a creative model.

I love creating mysteries, but I am terrible at solving them.

Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson – writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers.

I’ve had a somewhat typical experience in that many of the contemporary writers I was exposed to early on were white and often male.

When I’m between projects, I keep a journal I call a ‘thought log,’ and it’s my practice to write down whatever interests me.

I love Javier Marias; I love his novel ‘Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.’

Holy cow – everything about writing a novel is hard for me.

Not long after watching ‘The Passenger,’ I wrote the first lines of ‘The Isle of Youth,’ which concerns twin sisters who swap identities and become ensnared in the Miami underworld.

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

I realized that, for me, travel for work – I’m not speaking so much about travel for pleasure – had actually become a way of avoiding life.

Here’s something a little more personal: In my teens, I was having a hard time and ended up in a therapy group of young women, some of whom had endured terrible childhood traumas.

Unlike a novel, where you expect a different kind of arc that leaves us with a somber sense of resolution, I think a story in some ways as like a train window: being able to watch the landscape pass for a certain amount of time. And then your stop arrives, and you have to leave.

I have no problem quitting things, because I have a horror of boredom.

As a teenager, I struggled a lot, had several major depressive episodes, and ended up dropping out of high school and getting a GED.

I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work’s DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you.

With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings.

As a reader, I appreciate a world that feels unsettled and also visceral, inhabitable, so that’s a quality I try and bring to my own work. In this way, dislocation and precision make total sense to me as a unit.

Often, contrasts bring art to life: the bright speck of paint on a dark canvas; the tightrope walk between humor and tragedy.

There’s the public self that we present to the outer world. There’s the private self, which maybe takes more time to access. But ultimately, what I’m most interested in as a writer is a few notches below the private self.

Children exist in the worlds that adults create for them, both locally and globally, and their options are, by virtue of age, often painfully limited.

I’m such a first-person writer.

I think that one thing about teaching is you’re trying to communicate your thoughts about a work to a group of people who may or may not share that sentiment. This has forced me to become a lot more articulate about what I respond to and what I don’t respond to in fiction.

In the world of the American creative writing workshop, I’ve encountered teachers who are tempted to place, or have actually placed, a moratorium on child narrators. Students love to write them, but children come laden with complications.

In ‘The Third Hotel,’ my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She’s trying to make sense of her husband’s death, how someone’s life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life.

To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills.

I take a pretty expansive view of craft, which is to say I don’t see craft as just being technique – it’s also process; subject; ideas and feelings; visions and dreams; the words that are put down and the words that are avoided.

Sometimes we talk about memory as though it’s firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation.

When I was in grad school, my husband and I used to house sit for a couple in Harvard Square, so we have these amazing memories of great Cambridge summers.

I teach fiction in my workshops, and some of the readings could be classified as horror. For example, ‘House Taken Over,’ a short story by Julio Cortazar, is a work I regularly teach.

I lived in Boston for three years, and during that time, I wrote my first collection of stories, ‘What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us;’ other stories that didn’t make it into the collection; and several failed novel openings.

I think my concern is I know my voice, and I know the kinds of landscapes that interest me, so my primary concern is doing the most I can with those voices and those landscapes.

My students are often asking me, ‘What do you think are the most important qualities for a writer?’ And one thing I always tells them is that it’s helpful to be willing to sit in a space of uncertainty. There are entire years, especially with novels, where you really don’t know where the project is going.

As we know all too well, our early years are formative in ways it can takes us a lifetime to grasp. Those years leave deep marks; in that way, the stakes of childhood are inherently very high.

In terms of specific cinematic influences, certainly I’d recommend ‘Juan de los Muertos,’ and I also really love this French zombie movie – ‘Les Revenants’ – where the dead reanimate for no apparent reason.

Publishing at a young age is not really an indicator of talent.

I think we’re often guilty of gravitating towards the familiar. Even if we recognize that certain patterns are unsatisfying and destructive, there can still be a comfort in the familiar recognition of a cycle repeating itself.

The kind of dystopian books that I’ve always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that’s less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different.

On my first trip to Havana, I was stopped by a woman who turned out to be a Canadian tour guide and who had mistaken me for a woman who had been part of one of her tour groups.