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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.

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
Destroy
Guess
Raised
Physical
Books
Didn
Sanctity
Book
Household
Reverence

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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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Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it's much too late.
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You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
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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 have spent many, many hours reading J.K. Rowling's work. I am a known 'Harry Potter' fan.
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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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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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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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There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.
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Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.
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It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.
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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 pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.
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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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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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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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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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