Lev Grossman Quotations

I studied the cello for a long time, from when I was little up through college.

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.

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.

I loved fantasy, but I particularly loved the stories in which somebody got out of where they were and into somewhere better - as in the Chronicles Of Narnia, The Wizard Of Oz, The Phantom Tollbooth, the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon.

When it comes to true humility in the face of history, nothing beats complete silence.

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.

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.

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.

I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they're actually not as important as they're sometimes given credit for.

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.

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.

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. '

I've only read three books by Stephen King. When I was 10 I read 'The Long Walk,' one of his pseudonymous Bachman books. In my early 20s, while trapped on a family vacation, I read 'The Dark Half,' which taught me a word I have never forgotten: psychopomp. Now I have read '11/22/63.'

I think every fantasy reader secretly believes they know how magic works.

I'm happy to report that 'The New Press' is still in business to this day. But not thanks to me. I was a really bad publishing intern.

I got my first whiff of what big-time adult literature was all about when I was in 8th grade. I got it from Mark Linn-Baker. You know - the guy from 'Perfect Strangers.'

I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.

I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game.

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.

Growing up in the '70s and '80s, science fiction and especially fantasy had such a stigma attached to them. I felt so punished and exiled for being devoted to these things.

I've drunk Amazon's free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I'm not anti-Amazon, and I'm not pro-publishers either. I'm pro-books.

It's no longer possible to simply build English country houses out of words, because they've already been so thoroughly described that all the applicable words have been used up, and one is forced to build them instead out of words recycled and scavenged from other descriptions of other country houses.

It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.

A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.

When I got to college I simply decided that I could speak French, because I just could not spend any more time in French classes. I went ahead and took courses on French literature, some of them even taught in French.

When I left college I thought - based on a staggeringly inadequate understanding of how the world worked - that I might like to go into book publishing.

I have spent many, many hours reading J.K. Rowling's work. I am a known 'Harry Potter' fan.

Hating a book is not unlike hating a person; in fact it's tempting to just go ahead and hate the author personally, by proxy, qua human being, except that I know that would be a mistake.

My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don't buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed.

Which is the healthier kind of literary diversity: an un-gate-kept self-published book world, run substantially through Amazon? Or our current book world, which is part-gate-kept, part-not, with many different publishers and retailers and platforms? I'm not smart enough to figure it out, but if I had to guess I'd guess the latter.

What surprised me about 'The Casual Vacancy' was not just how good it was, but the particular way in which it was good.

Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English.

I've read plenty of J.G. Ballard, but I'm not really a Ballardian. I've met Ballardians, and I know when I can't compete. I like Ballard in his relatively unchallenging apocalyptic mode: 'Vermilion Sands,' 'The Drowned World,' 'The Burning World,' 'The Crystal World.'

The year after I graduated college I had a job in a library. When people underlined passages in the library books, or made notes in the margins, the books were sent to me. I erased the lines and the notes. Yes, that was my job.

It seems to me that the novel as a medium has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. By which I mean: there are a lot of novels published, but the vast majority of them don't represent major contributions to the medium.

It's not really possible to open 'The Casual Vacancy' without a lot of expectations both high and low crashing around in your brain and distorting your vision. There's no point pretending they're not there.

I'm not a Dickens guy. In grad school I had to take at least one course on the Victorians, so I took The Later Dickens, because that was what there was.

I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years.

In a way fighting was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.

Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.

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.

The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, the people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.

She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

You're saying the gods don't have free will." "The power to make mistakes," Penny said. "Only we have that. Mortals

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.

Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.

She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master.

The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?

We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.

Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up.

He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.

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.

We have lived too long. The great days are past.

I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.

Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.

The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten.

My ultimate goal is to drive people back to the books, when I think of an adaptation.

I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.

I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.

I have spent many, many hours reading J.K. Rowling's work. I am a known 'Harry Potter' fan.

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.

My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.

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.

It's a terrible thing for a book, when you feel like you're supposed to like it.

I've stayed in houses that were in the country, and in England, but I'm still not sure that I've stayed in an English country house.

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.

Most people are blind to magic. They move thru a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing and they’re dead before they die.

Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.

His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.

It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.

His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he'd gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.

It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though-- and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger-- he was angry only because his position was so weak.

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.

I recognize that on paper, you can't really tell that I'm a fan or a nerd.

And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.

Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.

I read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think will subsequently be recognized as one of the first great novels of the 21st century.

Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.

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.

I always hated those fantasy books where, at the end, all the kids had to go home. At the end of a Narnia book, you always got shown the door. Same with The Wizard Of Oz and The Phantom Tollbooth. You get kicked out of your magic land. It's like, "By the way, here's your next surprise: You get to go home!" And the kids are all like, "Yay, we get to go home!" I never bought that. Did anybody buy that?

I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.

People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.

Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?" "Oh, absolutely," Quentin said. "Maybe even more.

Escapism has value, even if I don't know what its value is, exactly. Maybe it's just part of some healthy way that we deal with the world.

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.

It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.

Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.

The main advantage of being a reviewer is that you read a lot. A lot of books get sent to you, and you have an amazing vantage point from which to observe what's going on in contemporary fiction - not only genre stuff, the whole spectrum.

Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

About as close you can get to the perfect cerebral thriller: searingly smart, ridiculously funny, and fast as hell... I defy anybody to read the first page and not keep going to the last.

In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't.

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.

The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.

More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn't afraid of looking uncool - he wasn't scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.

It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.

The real world is horrible.

There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.