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Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.

Lauren Groff

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Lauren Groff
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Cooperstown
New York
Eras
Intense
Historical
Periods
Broken
Times
Cyclical
Everything
Idealism
Cynicism

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You had to pick up a landline to make sure your best friend wore a matching outfit to school. I do remember people talking more. Nostalgia is dangerous, though.
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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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A female writer does definitely get more attention if she writes about male characters. It's true. It's considered somehow more literary, in the same way that it's more literary to write about supposedly male subjects, such as war. You're considered more seriously by the literary establishment.
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I'm a private person, a shy person. Sometimes, reading for eleven hours straight feels to me like the perfect way to spend a day.
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Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there's an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader's head.
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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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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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Our human impulse is to control everything, but fiction seems to me to be about allowing an element of mystery into the text.
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And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms.
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At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.
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Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren't sure if we even liked one another anymore.
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If the literary category of 'mordant fable' exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed, and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird.
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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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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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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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Sex makes things strained. There are lovely people in Oneida, but everyone was married to everyone else. And you had fathers and mothers watching their twelve-year-old daughters being inducted into the group marriage by sixty-five-year-old men. There are creepy aspects of a lot of intentional communities when it comes to sex.
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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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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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While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.
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When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.
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