David Bergen

“I think my writing was certainly shaped from having lived in a place like Niverville as well as by the family that I came from, the religion that I had, that type of thing.”

“The IMPAC is a terribly important award.”

“As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.”

“The story wrote quickly. I called it 'Where You're From,' and I sent it out, as I had numerous other stories over the years. Except this time I got a letter back saying that it would be published. Someone out there had liked the story. I was thirty-one years old.”

“An editor is an accomplice, looking in from the outside. That objective view is essential. We don't write in a vacuum, and we don't publish in a vacuum.”

“Though I loved books as a young boy, I loved sports even more. I wanted to be a quarterback in the CFL.”

“One day, at my office, I wrote down some names and dates and notes, and I wrote a title, 'The Age of Despair,' and then some other 'Ages' - Innocence, God, Reason, Hope - and I wrote this as well: 'Woman, born in 1930, lives till the age of 80 or so, suffers depression, marries a car dealer, has children who grow up to confuse her.'”

“Her mother had once told her that one could run away from home, from husband, from children, from trouble, but it was impossible to run away from oneself. "You always have to take yourself with you," she said. And now, bending towards her mother, Hope wondered if in death you were finally able to run away from yourself. This might be death's gift. She knew that the thought wasn't terribly profound, but she was moved by the notion of completion and of escape.”

“Every year, the Giller jury is different. You write the best book you can and throw it out there.”

“That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.”

“It took me ten years to write a proper story. I floundered about trying to shape something, counting on the 'feeling' I had as I wrote, only to discover upon rereading my work that the feeling had disappeared, and what remained was an empty shell.”

“I was a big reader of Zane Grey as a young boy, and so horses and the West figured large in my imagination.”

“When I get moved to write a story, I don't question the story. I dive right in, and I try to ignore the voices that are chattering away at me: 'You can't do that', 'You shouldn't do that'. I just sort of leap and take a chance and go for it.”

“I usually submit a novel at a certain number of words, and when I've finished working with my editor, the novel is longer than when I submitted it. I need my editor to help me open up the story.”

“I tend to push whatever is looking over my shoulder away when I am writing. It's once the box of books arrive that I say I'm going to be pilloried for this or that. But then you realize it's done, and there is nothing I can do. I'm proud of the book.”

“I gave up writing for seven years (very biblical) and picked it up again, still clueless and still seeking the exotic, when I was twenty-one.”

“-And what would you do if you lost a child?-I would think I was going to die, Elena said. But I wouldn't. I learned long ago that I must give up my child to the earth, to God, to the world, to death, to the possibility of death, to the possibility of disease, and in doing so I became at peace. Because I had let my child go. And in letting the child go, I became colder, more distant, and more at peace. But I still loved the child, don't be wrong. As you love your child. I am sorry.”

“For me, when I 'discover' a story, there is a feeling of buoyancy and clarity, perhaps similar to early morning out on a prairie highway, when darkness lifts and reveals the outline of farmhouses and copses of trees in the distance.”

“Invite characters of surprising and moral character, or at least those who grapple with what is right or those who make decisions that shock.”

“At the age of twenty, having published nothing and having had little guidance in my reading, I decided that I wanted to write.”