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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
Gotten
Forgiving
Habit
Novel
Middle
Book
Something
Ending

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There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.
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I'm not one of your knockabout, knuckle-scarred, Internet-controversy-courting book critics. Occasionally I stumble into controversy accidentally, but not because I enjoy it. It's probably just because I'm a weird person.
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Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all.
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It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.
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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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The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?
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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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