122 Quotes by Laura van den Berg

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.

If you're working on a novel, whatever you do, don't say, 'I am almost finished with my novel.' It's worse than chanting Bloody Mary three times in front of a mirror.

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.

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.

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

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

If we can think of a place, the physicality of a place, as a kind of 'material,' I would say the landscape of Florida in particular was especially important while writing 'Isle.'

In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface.

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