Lev Grossman Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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America tends to worship the modest talent because it doesn't put us in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the artist.
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I converse with my dog through ESP.
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I do always have a wall up. But I feel by doing it, I keep myself safe.
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Justice is revenge.
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After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
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It angers me when sustainability gets used as a buzz word. For 90 percent of the world, sustainability is a matter of survival.
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Now I am not against widgets, those small third-party applications that people can put on their Web pages on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, in general.
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The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body.
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I'm not Mr. Mom, but there's just certain things I won't say anymore.
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I feel like a member of any group comprised of outsiders.
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The first time I worked with colors was by making these mosaics of Pantone swatches. They end up being very large pictures, and I photographed with a very large camera - an 8x10 camera. So you can see the surface of every single swatch - like in this picture of Chuck Close. And you have to walk very far to be able to see it.
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Italian was my first foreign language. I speak it better than English.
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I enjoy stand-up because it has the biggest reward: instant gratification. You can hear the people laughing.
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We grew up listening to music like that: we grew up on the snap music, grew up off the trap music, grew up on all the South sound.
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You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
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I remember when I first met Katherine Bigelow for 'Zero Dark Thirty' – actually, we met for another movie, and that never got made, and then she called me and invited me to 'Zero Dark Thirty'.
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These days we're all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives.
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The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.
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Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.
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I had a great high-school experience. I had a lot of friends that I'm still really good friends with, but there's always times where a group can't understand what the individual is experiencing, or you're going through something at home that you can't bring to school and have a total understanding among your peers.
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New York State is upside down and backwards; high taxes and low performance. The New York State government was at one time a national model. Now, unfortunately, it's a national disgrace. Sometimes, the corruption in Albany could even make Boss Tweed blush.
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It would be nice if we redefined what we meant by 'war story.' If you're making $15,000 a year living in a certain area of Portland, trying to make it with three kids and no husband, that's a kind of war.
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Though narrative cohesion isn't the strength of 'Mean Girls,' which works better from scene to scene than as a whole, the intelligence shines in its understanding of contradictions, keeping a comic distance from the emotional investment of teenagers that defined 'Ridgemont High' and later the adolescent angst movies of John Hughes.
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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.
