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When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.

Lauren Groff

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Lauren Groff
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Cooperstown
New York
Write
Writing
Work
World
Anew
Layers
Worlds
Throwing
Building

More quotes by Lauren Groff

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I do like Twitter. Writing is a solitary pursuit, and it can get lonely. I like to go into Twitter for a short period of time, communicate with clever friends, and then switch it off. That's perfect for me.
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I'm ambivalent about the Orange Prize. I was really proud to be shortlisted alongside the other writers, whom I admire. That said, I don't know if it's best way of addressing gender inequality problems.
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Childhood is such a delicate tissue what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.
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In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.
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Parenthood means becoming comfortable with the fact that there are things outside your control, things that end and fail, just as most utopias end and by some measure fail. And just because they're a failure doesn't mean there isn't value there.
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Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?
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Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur we choose to love we do not choose to cease loving.
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I've always relied on producing more material than I need. With each of my published novels I've written around four times the amount of material that's ended up in the book.
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Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.
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Being a writer means I sit in a dark (and pretty dank) room off my garage for many hours a day, and in my wallowing moments I can feel as if I'm already on the outside of society, peering wistfully in.
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I'm a physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.
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It's wonderful that nothing you write is ever going to be as beautiful as what's in your head, because that gap is where the art can enter and begin to stretch its limbs.
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The idea of legitimacy is something I suppose I deal with in my fiction, and in part it's probably a response to my upbringing. When I was growing up I was the middle child, pathologically shy, in a family with a very loud and opinionated older brother, and I felt as if I never had the right to speak. As a result, I simply didn't speak very much.
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Research is about following the gleam into the dark. It's also about being sensitive enough to know which fact is the creative fact the fertile fact the fact that suggests and engenders, as opposed to the fact that deadens and kills a delicate new project.
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As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.
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In my totally unscientific yet enthusiastic survey of Communal Experiments Throughout American History, I've discovered that the thing most likely to break up said experiments is: Sex, all that murky, dark, dirty gunk simmering beneath human relations.
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As soon as you publish a book and the reader reads it, they're making an extension of your brain with their brain.
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There is part of me that longs to have the back-to-the-earth life - make my own bread, grow my own wheat, just be really self-sufficient - but I am not, at the moment, willing to give up the luxury of modern life, and amazing schools for my kids, and things that I've come to rely on that are parts of society.
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My childhood was as conventional as you could get.
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Even the presence of my kids cannot, during those writing hours, disturb me. Unless there's a bone sticking out of their arm, I'm not interested.
Lauren Groff