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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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Lev Grossman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: June 26
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Lexington
Massachusetts
Defined
Books
Book
Much
Middles
Oddly
Endings
Meanings
Beginnings

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Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.
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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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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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Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.
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Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else.
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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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It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.
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I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.
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You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.
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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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I don't know if I've ever derived such an immediate sense of calm and well-being from any book as I did from 'Right Ho, Jeeves.' It was like I was Pac-Man and the book was a power-up.
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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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Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.
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It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.
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The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?
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I recognize that on paper, you can't really tell that I'm a fan or a nerd.
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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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My ultimate goal is to drive people back to the books, when I think of an adaptation.
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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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