Lev Grossman Quotes
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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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People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
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Quentin had an obsolete sailing ship that had been raised from the dead. He had psychotically effective swordsman and an enigmatic witch-queen. It wasn't the Fellowship of the Ring, but then again he wasn't trying to save the world from Sauron, he was trying to perform a tax audit on a bunch of hick islanders.
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And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.
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By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.
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Nothing is wrong with you. You're not different. Everybody feels as bad as you do: this is just what writing a novel feels like. To write a novel is to come in contact with raw, primal feelings, hopes and longings and psychic wounds, and try to make a big public word-sculpture out of them, and that is a crazy hard thing to do.
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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.
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The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.
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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.
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You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
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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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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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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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I recognize that on paper, you can't really tell that I'm a fan or a nerd.
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My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
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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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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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Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.
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When I was 35 I realized that I was still thinking a lot about what it would be like to go to Narnia. To really go - not just in a daydream, or in a children's book, but what it would actually feel like, physically, psychologically, every other way. The idea was haunting me.
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I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
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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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I think every fantasy reader secretly believes they know how magic works.
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The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?
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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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You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.
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The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, the people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.
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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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I love playing with the conventions of fantasy, and breaking rules, and crossing lines.
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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.
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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.
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