Lauren Groff Quotes

As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

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.

Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.

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?

If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.

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.

The gender inequality in book reviewing isn't getting better. Male authors get the majority of review coverage, and male reviewers do most of the reviewing. It's kind of devastating.

It's not easy to make friends when you're an adult writer outside of academia, especially when you work alone in a little room for twelve hours a day, and so I wrote toward what I most longed for.

In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.

I'm a writer, not an actor. I want to write rather than perform. I'm looking forward to disappearing for a while.

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.

My childhood was as conventional as you could get.

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.

But I've married a deeply sensible person who is extremely good at talking me down from my various ledges, and who takes care of me in a billion ways.

At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.

I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms.

Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.

Our human impulse is to control everything, but fiction seems to me to be about allowing an element of mystery into the text.

When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.

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.

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.

I'm kind of a control freak. But there are others like me.

I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night.

As soon as you publish a book and the reader reads it, they're making an extension of your brain with their brain.

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.

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.

If you look at communal experiments in general for any amount of time, you'll find a lot of horrors: raped children, sexual slavery, eugenics experiments, on and on.

Writing by hand is a way of letting mystery into my writing. But I'm constantly trying to figure out how to do this job. It's a work in progress.

I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.

We need the skeletons of other stories to understand our own, sometimes.

I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.

Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.

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.

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.

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.

I'm a physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.

Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.

I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work.

I have a feeling that books are a lot like people - they change as you age, so that some books that you hated in high school will strike you with the force of a revelation when you're older.

The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.

A lot of my work comes from a place of despair or fear. I often write in order to gain some sort of control over aspects of my life or the world that seem too dark to look at directly.

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.

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.

Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.

I'm always hungry for people.

He got drunk as usual, but instead of drifting to sleep, he stayed up, and at a white heat, wrote what had been sitting on his heart for decades.

Perhaps living in fear can drive all devils out of a person.

Don't they understand what fiction is?

When your family dismisses you, like Lotto's did, you create your own family