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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
Terrible
Book
Feel
Feels
Thing
Like
Supposed

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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.
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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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Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.
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You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.
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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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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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I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
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People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
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I think for a long time, I was paralyzed by some of my hopes and ideals for what my life was going to be like. I had this perfect vision of how my life should go, but it seemed - it was - impossible to realize, so I sat around for a long, long time doing almost nothing at all.
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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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The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, the people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.
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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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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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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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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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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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It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.
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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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