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I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.

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
Conscious
Influence
White
Feel
Feels
Important
Influences

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Supposedly I've got traces of an English accent, though I can't hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who's English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.
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My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
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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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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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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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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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Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.
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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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The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that's something people are looking for.
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He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
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As a writer I'm more drawn to villains who are just slightly mad.
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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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