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Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.

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
Nobody
Everybody
Story
Stories
Wanted
Relief
Comic
Hero

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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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Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.
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We have lived too long. The great days are past.
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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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His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
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I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.
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That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.
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He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.
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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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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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There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.
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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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You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
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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 feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
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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.
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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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Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.
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My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
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