Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Lauren Groff

Image
As soon as you publish a book and the reader reads it, they're making an extension of your brain with their brain.
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
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.
Lauren Groff
Image
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.
Lauren Groff
Image
At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.
Lauren Groff
Image
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.
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
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
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
Image
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.
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
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
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
Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.
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
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.
Lauren Groff
Image
When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.
Lauren Groff
Image
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.
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
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