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It's a terrible thing for a book, when you feel like you're supposed to like it.

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
Supposed
Terrible
Book
Feel
Feels
Thing
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He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
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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?
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Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.
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Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.
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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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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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Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
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You're saying the gods don't have free will. The power to make mistakes, Penny said. Only we have that. Mortals
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We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.
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There is really no end to life's little humiliations.
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Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.
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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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My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
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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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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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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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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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I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
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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.
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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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