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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
Able
Everything
Writing
Never
Havens
Haven
Read
Write
Anything

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The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.
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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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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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I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.
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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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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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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 world is horrible.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
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