Quote

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.

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
Amount
Written
Relied
Four
Published
Times
Producing
Around
Novels
Ended
Book
Material
Need
Novel
Always

More quotes by 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
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.
Lauren Groff
Image
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
Image
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.
Lauren Groff
Image
I love Twitter. It's like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you're tired of them.
Lauren Groff
Image
I'm a writer, not an actor. I want to write rather than perform. I'm looking forward to disappearing for a while.
Lauren Groff
Image
At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.
Lauren Groff
Image
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
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
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
Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.
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
The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.
Lauren Groff