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I'm happy to report that 'The New Press' is still in business to this day. But not thanks to me. I was a really bad publishing intern.

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
Really
Reports
Presses
Thanks
Press
Happy
Business
Intern
Stills
Report
Still
Publishing

More quotes by Lev Grossman

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It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.
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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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It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.
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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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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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The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?
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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.
Lev Grossman
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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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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.
Lev Grossman
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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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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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Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.
Lev Grossman
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Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.
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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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His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
Lev Grossman
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Until now, I've been a kind of binge-writer - I'll carve out five or six hours on a weekend day and make a large container of espresso and just bang out a lot of words.
Lev Grossman
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Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?
Lev Grossman
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You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.
Lev Grossman
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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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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