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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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Lev Grossman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: June 26
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Lexington
Massachusetts
Wonderful
Around
Play
Unbroken
Fantasy
Amazing
Rules
Number
Numbers

More quotes by 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.
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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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My ultimate goal is to drive people back to the books, when I think of an adaptation.
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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 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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As a writer I'm more drawn to villains who are just slightly mad.
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Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.
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We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.
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It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.
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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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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 recognize that on paper, you can't really tell that I'm a fan or a nerd.
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That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.
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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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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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My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
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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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It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
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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 feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
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