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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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Lev Grossman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: June 26
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Lexington
Massachusetts
Writing
Never
Havens
Haven
Read
Write
Anything
Able
Everything

More quotes by Lev Grossman

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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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You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.
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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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There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.
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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.
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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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The real world is horrible.
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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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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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How often have I met and disliked writers whose books I love and conversely, hated the books and then wound up liking the writer? Too often.
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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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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.
Lev Grossman
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As a writer I'm more drawn to villains who are just slightly mad.
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Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do? Oh, absolutely, Quentin said. Maybe even more.
Lev Grossman
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I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that's just what people did where I grew up.
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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A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.
Lev Grossman
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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.
Lev Grossman
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It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.
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