Quote

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.

Lev Grossman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lev Grossman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: June 26
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Lexington
Massachusetts
Real
Expect
World
Realize
Realizing
Looking
Wired
Start
Brighter
Interesting
Meaningful
Actually
Obviously
Around
Expectations

More quotes by Lev Grossman

Image
His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
Lev Grossman
Image
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.
Lev Grossman
Image
A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.
Lev Grossman
Image
It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.
Lev Grossman
Image
Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.
Lev Grossman
Image
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.
Lev Grossman
Image
We have lived too long. The great days are past.
Lev Grossman
Image
The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?
Lev Grossman
Image
It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.
Lev Grossman
Image
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.
Lev Grossman
Image
You're saying the gods don't have free will. The power to make mistakes, Penny said. Only we have that. Mortals
Lev Grossman
Image
It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.
Lev Grossman
Image
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.
Lev Grossman
Image
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
Image
Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it's much too late.
Lev Grossman
Image
I recognize that on paper, you can't really tell that I'm a fan or a nerd.
Lev Grossman
Image
You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
Lev Grossman
Image
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. '
Lev Grossman
Image
You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.
Lev Grossman
Image
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.
Lev Grossman