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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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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There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.
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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.
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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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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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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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The real world is horrible.
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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.
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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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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.
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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 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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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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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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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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I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.
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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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Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.
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I have spent many, many hours reading J.K. Rowling's work. I am a known 'Harry Potter' fan.
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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.
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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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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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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.