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A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.

Lev Grossman

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Lev Grossman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: June 26
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Lexington
Massachusetts
Something
Ending
Gotten
Forgiving
Habit
Novel
Middle
Book

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I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.
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Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.
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His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
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Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it's much too late.
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In a way fighting was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.
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The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.
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You're all so obsessed with other worlds, you're so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you've never bothered to figure out what's going on here!
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You're saying the gods don't have free will. The power to make mistakes, Penny said. Only we have that. Mortals
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You don't want to move toward some utopian literary situation where everybody's free of all conventions. That's ridiculous! Conventions are what you need. You have nothing to break down if you don't have conventions.
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Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.
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How often have I met and disliked writers whose books I love and conversely, hated the books and then wound up liking the writer? Too often.
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I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that's just what people did where I grew up.
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I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.
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Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.
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The real world is horrible.
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We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.
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Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching away one's will to live.
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The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?
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I feel that's one of the central questions of fantasy. What did we lose when we entered the 20th and 21st century, and how can we mourn what we lost, and what can we replace it with? We're still asking those questions in an urgent way.
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Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.
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