A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I’ve just gotten in the habit of forgiving.
LEV GROSSMANPeople – me included – want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
More Lev Grossman Quotes
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He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
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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.
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It’s an engrossing look at the way the flow of information shapes history-as well as a rare glimpse into the soul of the hardcore geek
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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 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.’
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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.
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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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The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.
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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.
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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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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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Maybe there’s a sense that technology isn’t necessarily the answer to a lot of our problems. Fantasy offers readers a less radically alienated world – a world where desires and feelings that normally are trapped inside your mind are made real in the form of magic.
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You’re all so obsessed with other worlds, you’re so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you’ve never bothered to figure out what’s going on here!
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We have lived too long. The great days are past.
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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.
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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.
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It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
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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.
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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.
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Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously.
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I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
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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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The real world is horrible.
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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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His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
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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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