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Lauren Graham

Lauren Graham Books

Actress

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“I feel real ownership in this show. I feel very invested in it. I care very much about it. I don't feel any more like a hired hand, you know? It's a strange feeling - I feel personally responsible for how the story goes. What happens. What the weaknesses are. And so in a way, some of the changes gave me an opportunity to have a voice in a different way.”

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Author:Lauren Graham
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“I remember feeling a huge amount of anxiety and worry and pressure. At that point I was headed into acting school. That was 100 percent the only thing I thought I wanted to do. But then I got through my first year of college, and I was, like, humming and rolling around, pretending to be a lion in acting classes at NYU and visiting our classmate Charlie Gregg at Harvard, where he was actually learning things. So I changed my mind: I decided I actually wanted a different kind of education, and that was an incredibly freeing idea.”

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“I'm gonna try to talk about this in a secular way, but where's the spirituality of just being a person? I think it contributes to this rise in bad manners and mean comments; people are being driven by seeking something that's just designed to keep them seeking something. I'm not reducing people in this age to phone-addicted dum-dums, but we have to remind ourselves to also study compassion and inner life as well.”

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Author:Lauren Graham
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“My biggest goal was - I thought, God, if I could just be a rep company member at the Arena Stage in Washington, D. C. and get to play a bunch of parts in a year! And now in my work everything is about promoting it. It's not about the doing of it! Everything is: You have to sell it, and they ask you to tweet about it or do photo shoots, even for the smallest job. There's an imbalance in terms of what is actually gratifying. The stuff that is gratifying is, like I said, the day of work and the doing of it.”

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“I was always torn between wanting whatever I pictured as a typical high school experience and that being just a part I wanted to play. I've written about this, but one of those typical high school experiences was drill team. Like, I just really wanted to wear a uniform and get on the bus and be part of this group. As an only child, the idea of blending in - and literally everyone being in sync and not standing out at all - felt like kind of a fun family thing.”

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“It's core to my beliefs now: Sometimes in being given a challenge, you're actually being given a real opportunity, and a lot of that is how you handle it. Do you feel sorry for yourself or do you think, All right! I'll see what I can make out of this? I've had that over and over. If I hang out in the disappointment, I'll just be disappointed all the time.”

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Author:Lauren Graham
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“I would rather be a person who struggled there than someone who had a great, easy time and then got out in the world and was like, "Wait a minute, I didn't get voted class president? What's going on?" You know, "popular" doesn't necessarily correlate to anything. "Popular" still has to get up at 7:00 in the morning and go to work and do something worthy too. There's no edge, really, that you get from being whatever was popular in school.”

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Author:Lauren Graham
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“That's the thing that always stuck out to me - the idea that quantity becomes quality. I always took it to mean if you do anything enough, if you keep putting effort in, eventually something will happen, with or without you. You don't have to have faith when you start out, you just have to dedicate yourself to practice as if you have it.”

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Book:Someday, Someday, Maybe: A Novel
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“Over and over in the play my character says, "I'm thirty-two years old," as if that should explain everything that's wrong in her life. I don't know what it's like to be thirty-two, but I can imagine. I imagine she means she's stuck in an in-between time, she's at an age that isn't a milestone but more of a no-man's-land, an age where she's feeling like her hopes are fading.”

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Book:Someday, Someday, Maybe: A Novel
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