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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

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Lauren Groff
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Cooperstown
New York
Everything
Element
Allowing
Impulse
Mystery
Fiction
Control
Seems
Human
Text

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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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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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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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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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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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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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I'm always hungry for people.
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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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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 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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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