I recognize that on paper, you can’t really tell that I’m a fan or a nerd.
LEV GROSSMANThe 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.
More Lev Grossman Quotes
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A magician is strong because he feels the pain between what the world is and what he would make of it.
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The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all – in the end the vast majority of them simply aren’t that great, and are destined to be forgotten.
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Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it’s much too late.
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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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Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.
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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’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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He wasn’t surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you’ve done all the work to get something you don’t even want it anymore.
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The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.
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His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
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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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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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He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
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We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.
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