122 Quotes by Laura van den Berg

A collection is, by my lights, a chance to build a universe, an overarching ecosystem. But it's common enough to encounter a hodgepodge instead, where flashes of brilliance are undercut by clunkers.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Like many American readers, I was first introduced to Magda Szabo's work when New York Review Books reissued the Hungarian master's profound and haunting novel 'The Door.'

Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I'm feeling despairing about writing is to write.