Lev Grossman Quotes
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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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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.
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It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.
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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.'
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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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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.
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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. '
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Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.
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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 on Saturday morning in the '80s.
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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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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'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.
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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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There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.
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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.
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The real world is horrible.
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I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.
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I never thought about doing a sequel when I was actually writing 'The Magicians.' I only ever considered it a standalone.
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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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What surprised me about 'The Casual Vacancy' was not just how good it was, but the particular way in which it was good.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'