Lev Grossman Quotes

I love playing with the conventions of fantasy, and breaking rules, and crossing lines.

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.

I don't know if I've ever derived such an immediate sense of calm and well-being from any book as I did from 'Right Ho, Jeeves.' It was like I was Pac-Man and the book was a power-up.

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.

It's a terrible thing for a book, when you feel like you're supposed to like it.

My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.

We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all.

The real world is horrible.

Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.

It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.

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.

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.

I have spent many, many hours reading J.K. Rowling's work. I am a known 'Harry Potter' fan.

Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.

About as close you can get to the perfect cerebral thriller: searingly smart, ridiculously funny, and fast as hell... I defy anybody to read the first page and not keep going to the last.

His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.

Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?" "Oh, absolutely," Quentin said. "Maybe even more.

You're saying the gods don't have free will." "The power to make mistakes," Penny said. "Only we have that. Mortals

There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.

Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.

I never thought about doing a sequel when I was actually writing 'The Magicians.' I only ever considered it a standalone.

We have lived too long. The great days are past.

The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, the people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.

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.

I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

Earth or Fillory, did it even matter? What was the huge conundrum? Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it.

If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine.

Blue screen of death: she'd crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.

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.

Becoming me was the greatest creative project of my life.

He was in the right place. He was living his best life. How many other people in the multiverse could say that?

Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t.

She was the most beautiful, terrible thing he'd ever seen, like an acetylene flame, an incandescent filament, a fallen star right in front of him.

It wasn't nothing, but it wasn't everything either.

In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.

I killed the Google Alert I used to have on myself two years ago. I don’t need any more information about myself. I get more than enough of that just by being me.

What makes you think what happened to you on Earth wasn't an adventure?

If my generation is remembered for anything, it will be as the last one that remembers the world before the Internet.

You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.” “The power to make mistakes, ” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.

You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn't, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn't. Put it in perspective.

It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

Living in a castle is objectively romantic.

I call the right axe Sorrow, " she said. "You know what I call the left one?" "Happiness?" "Sorrow. I can't tell them apart.

The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn't love?

I just completed a long car trip on a Sunday in August with two small children, which believe me is enough to convince you that Samuel Beckett was right about everything.

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!