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It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.

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
Work
Deeply
Recognize
Literature
Feel
Feels
Great
Thing

More quotes by Lev Grossman

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It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen.
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A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can’t be how the universe works.” “In the Order we call it ‘inverse profundity.’ We’ve observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.
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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 real world is horrible.
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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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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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I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
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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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Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
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You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
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We have lived too long. The great days are past.
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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.
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Maybe there's a sense that technology isn't necessarily the answer to a lot of our problems. Fantasy offers readers a less radically alienated world - a world where desires and feelings that normally are trapped inside your mind are made real in the form of magic.
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The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.
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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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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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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.
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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That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.
Lev Grossman