Lauren Groff Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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?

  Lauren Groff

  Passion, India, Spain

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Looking Forward, Disappear

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Fans, World

  6 Copy quote

• I like people, I really do. I like meeting people. But most of the time I would rather be at home reading a book than reading in a bookstore. It's a performance, and it ends up being all right, and then you have a nice shot of bourbon afterwards, and it's all good. I want to please people. I want to be nice. I want to be liked. As a result I say yes to everything. But it takes a lot of vital energy out of me.

  Lauren Groff

  Nice, Book, Reading

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Song, Play, Sound

  4 Copy quote

• The novella is at once the most elegant and demanding form: a writer must balance the looseness of a novel with the concision of a short story, a feat that only the bravest and most talented of us can manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval proves, yet again, that she is exactly the right writer for the job. A wild American picaresque, Brazil snaps along briskly, yet feels full-fleshed, and brims with a sly wit and grace.

  Lauren Groff

  Jobs, Grace, Balance

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Lauren Groff

  Cat, Black, Way

  "Bit and Peace: Lauren Groff's Arcadia". Interview with Clare Stein, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 8, 2012.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Lauren Groff

  Wall, Writing, Character

  Interview with Jason Skipper, therumpus.net. August 24, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Lauren Groff

  Talking, Ledges, Care

  4 Copy quote

• My childhood was as conventional as you could get.

  Lauren Groff

  Childhood, Conventional

  "Bit and peace: Lauren Groff’s Arcadia". Interview with Clare Stein, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 8, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• Even still, we run. We have not reached our average of 57.92 years without knowing that you run through it, and it hurts and you run through it some more, and if it hurts worse, you run through it even more, and when you finish, you will have broken through. In the end, when you are done, and stretching, and your heartbeat slows, and your sweat dries, if you've run through the hard part, you will remember no pain.

  Lauren Groff

  Running, Hurt, Pain

  Lauren Groff (2012). “The Monsters of Templeton”, p.188, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Lauren Groff

  Children, Eugenics, Looks

  Interview with Jason Skipper, therumpus.net. August 24, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

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

  Lauren Groff

  Writing, Happy Life, Simple

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Hurt, Morning, Pain

  Lauren Groff (2012). “Arcadia”, p.77, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

• The darkest period of my life, so far, arrived the summer I was pregnant with my eldest son. The future was growing in me with all of its terrifying unpredictability, and I found myself anxious, unable to work and woefully at sea.

  Lauren Groff

  Summer, Son, Sea

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Sex, Dirty, Dark

  Interview with Jason Skipper, therumpus.net. August 24, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• She would always feel this wild girl was the truest of any of the people she had already been: adored daughter, bourgeois priss, rebel, runaway, dope-fiend San Francisco hippie; or all the people she would later be: mother, nurse, religious fanatic, prematurely old woman. Vivienne was a human onion, and when I came home at twenty eight years old on the day the monster died, I was afraid that the Baptist freak she had peeled down to was her true, acrid, tear-inducing core.

  Lauren Groff

  Girl, Daughter, Mother

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Girl, Depressing, Lunch

  Lauren Groff (2011). “Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories”, p.12, Random House

  4 Copy quote

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

  Lauren Groff

  Community, Want, Way

  Lauren Groff (2012). “Arcadia”, p.268, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Interview with Jason Skipper, therumpus.net. August 24, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  War, Community, Half

  Interview with Jason Skipper, therumpus.net. August 24, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

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

  Lauren Groff

  Broken, Historical, Eras

  Interview with Jason Skipper, therumpus.net. August 24, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• As with most of my work, I started from the abstract, from research, building an intellectual model that slowly became internalized when the characters came alive. It's fascinating what happens to the model you've so assiduously assembled when characters are allowed to run rampant: things you thought essential are broken and other things are vastly improved.

  Lauren Groff

  Running, Character, Broken

  Interview with Jason Skipper, therumpus.net. August 24, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• It's more like I write multiple first drafts, handwritten. So with my first novel, I wrote whole drafts from different points of view. There are different versions of that novel in a drawer on loose-leaf sheets. I won't even look at the first draft while I'm writing the second, and I won't look at the second before writing the third.

  Lauren Groff

  Writing, Different, Point Of View

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Novel

  4 Copy quote

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