Lauren Groff Quotes

When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

I, as the writer, can be very clear that I am writing a work of heightened fiction, as opposed to documenting horrible things that happen every day in the world. Which I have no interest in doing.

I love the resource of the Internet. I use it all the time. Anything I'm writing - for example, if I'm writing a scene about Washington D.C. and I want to know where this monument is, I can find it right away, I can get a picture of the monument, it just makes your life so much easier, especially if you're writing fiction. You can check stuff so much quicker, and I think that's all great for writers.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Returning to writing fiction after 13 years away from it. Returning to the rootstock of my whole life as a writer. It's what I had wanted to be for my entire life, since I can remember, since my particular time immemorial. It's how I got my start as a writer.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.

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

When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

[Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me...he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on.