A Quote by Laura van den Berg

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.
I love fiction. I like reading short stories. Cupcakes, pop songs, Polaroids, and short stories. They all raise and answer questions in a short space. I like Lorrie Moore. Amy Hempel. Tim O'Brien. Raymond Carver. All the heartbreakers.
I read Lorrie Moore and Marilynne Robinson and Jhumpa Lahiri and Richard Ford, John Updike, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov - all of whom I really fell in love with.
I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me. Alice Munro, I felt that way about from an early time. Grace Paley.
I couldn't choose a favourite author, but two contemporary writers who have never disappointed me are Tim Winton and Alice Munro.
I really like sardonicism and wit. I love the writing of Joy Williams and Lorrie Moore. I like Tina Fey, Amy Schumer.
I love Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore: such great short-story writers.
That's another thing in Alice Munro: it's always, like, some middle-aged woman who is going to cheat on her husband, and there's that moment where she decides to take an extreme risk. It's always after an extreme risk where life really happens for Alice Munro.
I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.
I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.
I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.
Peggy Atwood, Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Michael Ondaatje - these are all old friends from my early 20s.
Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.
Some of the writers I admire who seem very, very funny and very emotional to me can develop a closeness with the reader without giving too much of themselves away. Lorrie Moore comes to mind, as does David Sedaris. When they write, the reader thinks that they're being trusted as a friend.
I don't think she is underappreciated, certainly not among writers, but Alice Munro is the classic underappreciated writer among readers. It is almost a cliche now to wonder why this living legend is not more widely read.
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