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Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.

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
Anyone
Take
Writing
Seriously
Advice

More quotes by 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. '
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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
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Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.
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You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
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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.
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I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.
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I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.
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Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.
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It's a terrible thing for a book, when you feel like you're supposed to like it.
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Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it's much too late.
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A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.
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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.
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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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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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His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
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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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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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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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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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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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