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You're saying the gods don't have free will. The power to make mistakes, Penny said. Only we have that. Mortals

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
Free
Penny
Power
Pennies
Make
Mortals
Gods
Mistakes
Saying
Mistake
Choices

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I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.
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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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Maybe there's a sense that technology isn't necessarily the answer to a lot of our problems. Fantasy offers readers a less radically alienated world - a world where desires and feelings that normally are trapped inside your mind are made real in the form of magic.
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As a writer I'm more drawn to villains who are just slightly mad.
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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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The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that's something people are looking for.
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You're all so obsessed with other worlds, you're so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you've never bothered to figure out what's going on here!
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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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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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Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?
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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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People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
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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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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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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.
Lev Grossman
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It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.
Lev Grossman
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For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. 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. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.
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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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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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Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.
Lev Grossman