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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
Allowing
Impulse
Mystery
Fiction
Control
Seems
Human
Text
Everything
Element

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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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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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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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As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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If the literary category of 'mordant fable' exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed, and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird.
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I'm always hungry for people.
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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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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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The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.
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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?
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