Latest Lauren Groff Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I think I'm an optimistic person. Ultimately I believe in people. I believe they can be robust. When my collection Delicate Edible Birds came out there were one or two people who read the title as being a commentary on the characters within the pages, the women in the book, meaning that they were these fragile girls meant for male consumption. But I had meant the opposite - these people are tough. Dark things happen to them but they get on with life as best they can.

  Lauren Groff

  Girl, Believe, Book

• 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

  Lonely, Clever, Writing

• 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

• 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

• A female writer does definitely get more attention if she writes about male characters. It's true. It's considered somehow more literary, in the same way that it's more literary to write about supposedly male subjects, such as war. You're considered more seriously by the literary establishment.

  Lauren Groff

  War, Writing, Character

• 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

  Proud, Problem, Gender

• 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

  Southern

• 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.

  Lauren Groff

  Book, Get Better, Kind

• I can say that if you're a writer who happens to be a woman, you'll get a book cover that depicts a woman with no head, or a woman turning away, or a pair of high heels. You have to fight to not get stuck with these covers. In the U.S. women are chick-lit writers unless they prove otherwise, and that's frustrating.

  Lauren Groff

  Book, Fighting, Stuck

• I don't believe that fiction is dead. I know there are some people who believe that it's an outdated art form, and that to express truth today you need to work in different forms, to write books where it's perhaps not clear what's fiction and what's memoir. I have nothing against those books and love many of them very much. But we have enough space for everyone, traditional realists and hybrid writers, and experimental writers all.

  Lauren Groff

  Art, Believe, Book

• I'm feminist in that I believe that there should be equality between men and women. I get deeply frustrated on a daily basis by the enormous gender divide in the U.S. literary world. But I don't know how to deal with it, so I don't tend to say much about it.

  Lauren Groff

  Believe, Men, Feminist

• I feel like in American fiction we're moving out of a period of intense irony, and I'm very glad about that. I feel like irony is fine for its own sake but shouldn't be the sole reason to write a book. It has been an ironic world view: that's the best way I can describe it. I'm a fan of earnestness. I feel like there's a new wave of earnestness and I'd be happy if I'm some small part of that.

  Lauren Groff

  Book, Moving, Writing

• 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

  Mystery, Impulse

• 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.

  Lauren Groff

  Writing, Progress, Trying

• When I write a new draft, I don't like to feel I'm tied to any previous version. That's why I don't use a computer to write. The text looks, on the screen, too much like a book. It's not a book - it's a bad first draft of something that could one day be a book.

  Lauren Groff

  Book, Writing, One Day

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

  Lauren Groff

  Reading, Writing

• 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

• I had a series of terrible jobs, whatever would allow me to write for four hours during the day. During that time I wrote three novels - all of which were extraordinarily poor. I decided after that to go and get my MFA.

  Lauren Groff

  Writing, Hours, Poor

• 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

• I feel lucky. I do love it, mostly. At college I had it in my heart that I wanted to be a writer but I didn't want to tell anyone about it. Then I graduated and became a bartender in Philadelphia, writing during the day. I was the worst bartender in the world.

  Lauren Groff

  Writing, Heart, College

• 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

  Reading, Perfect, Shy

• 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.

  Lauren Groff

  Writing, Kids, Bones

• I kept a lot of my thoughts inside myself. So, perhaps more than is normal, I'm always questioning my role as a writer. I'm always stopping and asking myself: Do I have the right to tell this story? Is it a story that deserves to be heard? And as for whether I think of myself as a Writer with a capital "W," I very much hope I never do.

  Lauren Groff

  Thinking, Questioning, My Thoughts

• When I meet people I try to make a joke out of my occupation, explaining that what I do all day is sit alone in a darkened room, flicking through some pages, jumping on a treadmill now and then. I keep my serious work as a writer private, but that doesn't mean it's not serious work - quite the opposite.

  Lauren Groff

  Mean, People, Trying

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

  Lauren Groff

  Freak, Kind, Control Freak