Lauren Groff Quotes

I think it's hard to make a living as a writer, but I think it's hard to work at McDonald's too.... I think the commitment is to get up everyday and say, "I'm a writer, therefore what I'm supposed to do today is write." And to do that, and to do that and to do that.

You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.

I've been a writer for 42 years and, yes, it is a full time job for me. Not a hobby, but serious work.

An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it.

I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way.

I love being a writer. I have a great life. I get up in the morning and pad around in my dressing gown and listen to Radio 4.

I enter my studio at 9 a.m. I have lunch here, I return right away to my work and I go out to dinner at 8 p.m. My daily tasks vary very much.

It's insane that people have these Internet identities. It has very little to do with who we really are. As a writer, who I'm friends with, how I spend my time, what I look like, what I wear, what I eat, what kind of music I like - it's totally not important to the work.

I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don't have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.

The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.

Writing is a lonely profession.

I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.

I have a strong work ethic, yet I'm incredibly lazy as well. The problem with being a writer is that everything you do can be called research. Sitting in the pub is research. Reading the newspaper can be research.

If you are a writer, Saturday and Sunday don't mean anything.

Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.

In terms of people who want to be writers, I wish more people knew how much work it was.

I don't have a life, really. I take my kids to school, and I go home, and I write. Then I go pick my kids up, make them dinner, put them to bed, and write some more.

Writing, by nature, is a fairly solitary occupation.

Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.

People forget that after we get to our hotel rooms at night, we take a shower, we watch TV, eat room service and do normal things. Behind our image, we are still human beings.

Very little about being a writer is signing an autograph. It's sitting in a room and writing. Getting it out.

I do the same thing everyday. I go to work and paint. I try to turn out as many pictures as I can.

My normal writing day involves three hours of actual writing, before noon, and the rest is just feeding the writing. There is teaching (so I can afford to write), travel to be planned and executed. There are dozens of emails daily, gardening, lots of dishes (where do all these dishes come from?), daily family emergencies, and, of course, the petting of the donkeys. The smell of donkeys is heavenly, and their he-honking is the sweetest music. I feel calm just thinking about them.

A lot of being a writer doesn't have anything to do with writing. It's ironic - I have to squeeze the books in, even though that's what it's all about.

I get up every day and work in the morning. I have my coffee and get to work. On good days I look up and it's dark outside and the whole day has gone by and I don't know where it's gone. But there's bad days, too. Where I struggle and sweat and a half hour creeps by and I've written three words. And half a day creeps by and I've written a sentence and a half and then I quit for the day and play computer games. You know, sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you. [Laughs]