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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.

Lauren Groff

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Lauren Groff
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Cooperstown
New York
Happen
Woman
Doesn
Place
Identified
Always
Southern
Unfortunately
Writer

More quotes by Lauren Groff

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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.
Lauren Groff
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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.
Lauren Groff
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Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.
Lauren Groff
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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.
Lauren Groff
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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.
Lauren Groff
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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.
Lauren Groff
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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
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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.
Lauren Groff
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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.
Lauren Groff
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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.
Lauren Groff
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Song: Heloise and Abelard by Elizabeth Devlin. Beyond the a propros subject matter, this lady can really play the Autoharp. This song sounds like something you'd find on a gramophone record.
Lauren Groff
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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.
Lauren Groff
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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
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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.
Lauren Groff
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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
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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.
Lauren Groff
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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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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.
Lauren Groff
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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.
Lauren Groff
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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