Quote

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.

Lauren Groff

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Lauren Groff
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Cooperstown
New York
Perfect
Person
Eleven
Shy
Sometimes
Straight
Feels
Private
Like
Spend
Hours
Reading

More quotes by Lauren Groff

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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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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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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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At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.
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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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I'm a physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.
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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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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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It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you'd find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual.
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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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As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.
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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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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.
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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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I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work.
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My childhood was as conventional as you could get.
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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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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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I'm always hungry for people.
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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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