Quote

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.

Lauren Groff

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lauren Groff
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Cooperstown
New York
Book
Writing
Connecting
World
Writers
Characters
Reader
Inside
Living
Character

More quotes by Lauren Groff

Image
I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work.
Lauren Groff
Image
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?
Lauren Groff
Image
I'm a physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.
Lauren Groff
Image
When I was small and easily wounded books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.
Lauren Groff
Image
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.
Lauren Groff
Image
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.
Lauren Groff
Image
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.
Lauren Groff
Image
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.
Lauren Groff
Image
As soon as you publish a book and the reader reads it, they're making an extension of your brain with their brain.
Lauren Groff
Image
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.
Lauren Groff
Image
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.
Lauren Groff
Image
At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.
Lauren Groff
Image
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
Image
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.
Lauren Groff
Image
When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.
Lauren Groff
Image
Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.
Lauren Groff
Image
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.
Lauren Groff
Image
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.
Lauren Groff
Image
Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.
Lauren Groff
Image
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.
Lauren Groff