American - Writer | 1983 -
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.
Laura van den Berg
YouthMiamiLongBecomeWatching
I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear.
I AmHearMuchInfluencedVeryAm
To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills.
MemoryThinkSurvivalSkillsDegree
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.
MeEarlyImportantTeachersThrough
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.
GreatWritingThinkReadyWayHere
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.
LoveDeadReasonInfluencesWhere
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.
MeVoiceThinkDoingI CanKnow
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.
CountryPlaceSayFloridaFineOur
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.
LifeWorkTravelMeWayBecome
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.
TimeWorldSelfPresentMoreMost
In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface.
RiseFictionThingsSocialSurface
With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings.
CharacterThinkShortStoriesBoth
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Laura van den Berg quotes