Lev Grossman Quotes
You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.
If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.
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.
I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.
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.
That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.
It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.
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.
A magician is strong because he feels the pain between what the world is and what he would make of it.
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.
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!
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.
Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.
It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though-- and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger-- he was angry only because his position was so weak.
We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.
Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.
Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it's much too late.
A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.
I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.
I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.
How often have I met and disliked writers whose books I love; and conversely, hated the books and then wound up liking the writer? Too often.
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.
The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.
I'm happy to report that 'The New Press' is still in business to this day. But not thanks to me. I was a really bad publishing intern.
It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.
I read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think will subsequently be recognized as one of the first great novels of the 21st century.
The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that's something people are looking for.
I'm a fantasy writer. I don't do SF. This is important to me. If you're not clear on what genre you're in, everything gets muddled, and it's hard to know which rules you're breaking.