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.
LEV GROSSMANSupposedly 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.
More Lev Grossman Quotes
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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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I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.
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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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You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.” “The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals
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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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The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.
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The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.
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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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Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.
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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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The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.
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It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
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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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I think for a long time, I was paralyzed by some of my hopes and ideals for what my life was going to be like. I had this perfect vision of how my life should go, but it seemed – it was – impossible to realize, so I sat around for a long, long time doing almost nothing at all.
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Young minds – young brains – need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they’ll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.
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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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I studied the cello for a long time, from when I was little up through college.
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The truth doesn’t always make a good story, does it?
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I love playing with the conventions of fantasy, and breaking rules, and crossing lines.
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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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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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My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
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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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I recognize that on paper, you can’t really tell that I’m a fan or a nerd.
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People – me included – want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
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The real world is horrible.
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