Quote

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

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Lauren Groff
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Cooperstown
New York
Mean
Dark
Wallowing
Hours
Garage
Society
Outside
Means
Room
Moments
Writer
Many
Rooms
Wistfully
Feel
Already
Peering
Feels
Pretty
Dank

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As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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I'm a writer, not an actor. I want to write rather than perform. I'm looking forward to disappearing for a while.
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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.
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Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.
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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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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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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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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 physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.
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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.
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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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My childhood was as conventional as you could get.
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