Lauren Groff
Marriage seems to be predicated on protecting a very deep and intimate form of mystery.Collection: Marriage
There aren't very many good models of feminine rage - and the ones that we remember are ones where women take that anger internally and implode themselves in a real way, like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary.Collection: Anger
I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.
Sometimes immense things, like war and death and aging, are best seen from the corner of the eye and written of only obliquely, with tremendous lightness.
I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms. In America, possibly because of whatever the American dream is, this happens over and over again. These eras repeat.
At some point, I picked up an old library copy of 'To The Lighthouse' someone had bought for 25 cents. I began to read and didn't stop until the sun had blistered my back. A mysterious rightness, a beautiful submerged truth had invaded me, one that has ever since seemed slightly beyond my grasp.
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.
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. You know how in New York there's a lot of scaffolding? I won't walk under scaffolding or under ladders. I wear things like a baseball player wears things that are supposed to have luck.
My childhood was as conventional as you could get.
As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.
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.
I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms.
At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.
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.
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.
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.
I feel as if I've been so inured to failure, because I fail more than I succeed. As with any kind of fiction, I throw out so many pages; I get rejected so many times.
Time is the currency - the highest valued currency we have now. And people giving you their time is so incredible. They don't have to like your book, either. That's a totally separate gift.
I am a person beset with fears, and one of my fears is that this thing that I will be writing for five years won't work. And the likelihood, of course, is that it won't - and that's fine.
We think of stories a lot of the time as being horizontal texts, beginning to end. But I love the idea of having little vertical spikes in the story, too.
A lot of books about marriage are about marriages falling apart.
We're all functions of our societies, right? And we all become who we are because of the invisible forces that mold us.
I love that he's both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times. ... I love that within the world of Shakespeare's plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.
I once spent an entire night in a hotel in New York looking across the way into someone's apartment where nothing was happening but daily life, a phone call, television watching, staring into the fridge. Seeing how those strangers lived over that small distance and in absolute silence moved me deeply.
Bigger stories are made out of longer acquaintance with fact and character, but I also love the tiny stories in which almost everything has to be inferred and imagined.
Total intimacy is a myth; that said, a particular kind of loneliness can be both beautiful and fruitful.
My childhood was as conventional as you could get. I think I probably created 'Arcadia' with a certain amount of wishful thinking. I would have loved to have more looseness and freedom and community.
While I know some women who are stunningly sanguine when they're pregnant, I dissolve into a total mess. What normally appears sturdy turns fragile: the economy, the climate, humanity's baseline social contract.
I seem to long for community and mistrust it in equal measure, and so I spend most of my days carefully constructing various communities in stories and seeing if they fly.
The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.
Among so many things, 'Time Passes' has shown me subversive ways of portraying time, of looking away from the human to the far more terrifying, far more immense texture of time beneath the minute span of a human life.
In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.Collection: Lying
Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Hurt
The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.Collection: Writing
I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Clever
Sex is a good starting point for everything.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Daughter
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.Collection: Writing
Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.Collection: Sports
In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.Collection: World
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.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Reading
I'm a physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Book
I've never wanted to chuck my mortgage, drop the kids off at their grandparents' and run gloriously naked in fields of flax.Collection: Running
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Adults