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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
Wanted
Relief
Comic
Hero
Nobody
Everybody
Story
Stories

More quotes by Lev Grossman

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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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Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.
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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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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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It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though-- and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger-- he was angry only because his position was so weak.
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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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The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, the people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.
Lev Grossman
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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.
Lev Grossman
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I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.
Lev Grossman
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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. '
Lev Grossman
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Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
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Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.
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I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
Lev Grossman
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Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.
Lev Grossman
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I recognize that on paper, you can't really tell that I'm a fan or a nerd.
Lev Grossman
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The real world is horrible.
Lev Grossman
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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.
Lev Grossman
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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.
Lev Grossman
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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.
Lev Grossman
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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.'
Lev Grossman