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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
Novel
Middle
Book
Something
Ending
Gotten
Forgiving
Habit

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I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '
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People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
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The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.
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Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do? Oh, absolutely, Quentin said. Maybe even more.
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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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The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.
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He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
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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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I've only read three books by Stephen King. When I was 10 I read 'The Long Walk,' one of his pseudonymous Bachman books. In my early 20s, while trapped on a family vacation, I read 'The Dark Half,' which taught me a word I have never forgotten: psychopomp. Now I have read '11/22/63.'
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My ultimate goal is to drive people back to the books, when I think of an adaptation.
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Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.
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It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.
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That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.
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Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
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A magician is strong because he feels the pain between what the world is and what he would make of it.
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Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.
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Quentin had an obsolete sailing ship that had been raised from the dead. He had psychotically effective swordsman and an enigmatic witch-queen. It wasn't the Fellowship of the Ring, but then again he wasn't trying to save the world from Sauron, he was trying to perform a tax audit on a bunch of hick islanders.
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I have spent many, many hours reading J.K. Rowling's work. I am a known 'Harry Potter' fan.
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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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