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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.

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
Going
Staying
Way
Danger
Would
Present
Past
Stills
Still
Back
Play
Ruins

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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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As a writer I'm more drawn to villains who are just slightly mad.
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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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There is really no end to life's little humiliations.
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It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.
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It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
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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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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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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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Supposedly I've got traces of an English accent, though I can't hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who's English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.
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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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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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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.
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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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The real world is horrible.
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You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
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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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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 feel that's one of the central questions of fantasy. What did we lose when we entered the 20th and 21st century, and how can we mourn what we lost, and what can we replace it with? We're still asking those questions in an urgent way.
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My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
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