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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.

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
Never
Young
Figures
Like
Able
Ones
Ideas
Grow
Censored
Book
Grows
Banned
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Brain
Brains
Needs
Books
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Order
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Stories
Minds

More quotes by Lev Grossman

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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.
Lev Grossman
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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.
Lev Grossman
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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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Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.
Lev Grossman
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We have lived too long. The great days are past.
Lev Grossman
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As a writer I'm more drawn to villains who are just slightly mad.
Lev Grossman
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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.
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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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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The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.
Lev Grossman
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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!
Lev Grossman
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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.
Lev Grossman
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It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen.
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 mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.
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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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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I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
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.
Lev Grossman
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Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
Lev Grossman