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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.

Lauren Groff

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

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The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.
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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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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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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'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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Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.
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My childhood was as conventional as you could get.
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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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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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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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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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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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When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.
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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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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.
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As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.
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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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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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At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.
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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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