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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.

Lauren Groff

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

More quotes by Lauren Groff

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I won't walk under scaffolding or under ladders. I wear things like a baseball player wears things that are supposed to have luck. I am superstitious about everything.
Lauren Groff
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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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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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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.
Lauren Groff
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Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights! I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you're actively miserable.
Lauren Groff
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Song: Heloise and Abelard by Elizabeth Devlin. Beyond the a propros subject matter, this lady can really play the Autoharp. This song sounds like something you'd find on a gramophone record.
Lauren Groff
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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.
Lauren Groff
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My childhood was as conventional as you could get.
Lauren Groff
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I'm a physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.
Lauren Groff
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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.
Lauren Groff
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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?
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.
Lauren Groff
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Reading about utopianism, and eventually creating characters with their own utopian ambitions, was the way I learned to live with being a pregnant person, to stave off the sense of incipient disaster. You're bringing a person into this overcrowded world, knowing they're one day going to die and there's nothing you can do about it.
Lauren Groff
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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
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Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur we choose to love we do not choose to cease loving.
Lauren Groff
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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.
Lauren Groff
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I want to be identified as a writer, not a Southern writer, not a woman writer, not a woman from this or that place, but unfortunately it doesn't always happen.
Lauren Groff
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The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.
Lauren Groff
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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.
Lauren Groff
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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.
Lauren Groff