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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.

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
Feels
Make
Would
World
Magician
Pain
Strong

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That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.
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His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
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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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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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It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
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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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Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.
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I have spent many, many hours reading J.K. Rowling's work. I am a known 'Harry Potter' fan.
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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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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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Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.
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He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
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A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.
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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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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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It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.
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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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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!
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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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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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