A biography for Laura van den Berghasn’t been written yet.
“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.'”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear.”
“Publishing at a young age is not really an indicator of talent.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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'm pretty sure that I've never confessed in an interview my weakness for McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. The cheese is fake. Who knows what that 'fish' really is. It is gross. It is amazing.”
“The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are.”
“I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.'”
“I think where a writer falls on the realism/non-realism continuum has a lot to do with their sight, as in, 'This is how I see the world.' And it seems my sight is off-kilter and kind of strange, but I come by that naturally; I'm not consciously pushing toward a particular point on the continuum.”
“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.”
“Often, contrasts bring art to life: the bright speck of paint on a dark canvas; the tightrope walk between humor and tragedy.”
“As a genre, the best horror poses central human questions - Who can you trust? What is the cost of our secrets? What is our relationship to history? What are we blind to? What evils are lurking under the smooth surface of the self? - through radical dislocations.”
“Florida is a most unusual place. It can feel at once stifling and like anything is possible there.”
“I know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't.”
“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.”