Lev Grossman famous quotes

For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. 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. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.
-- Lev Grossman

#Inspirational #Real #Character

My ultimate goal is to drive people back to the books, when I think of an adaptation.
-- Lev Grossman

#Book #Thinking #People

Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.
-- Lev Grossman

#Writing #Media #Looks

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#Asking #Way #Fantasy

You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.
-- Lev Grossman

#People #About Yourself

It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen.
-- Lev Grossman

#Writing #Important #Tables

You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
-- Lev Grossman

#Quests #Wanted

You don't want to move toward some utopian literary situation where everybody's free of all conventions. That's ridiculous! Conventions are what you need. You have nothing to break down if you don't have conventions.
-- Lev Grossman

#Moving #Needs #Want

Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.
-- Lev Grossman

#Writing #Advice #Writing Advice

It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.
-- Lev Grossman

#Play #Numbers #Unbroken

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#Believe #Book #Order

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#Thinking #Firsts #Strange

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

#Book #Home #Matter

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#Dragons #Cartoon #Dungeons

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#Expectations #World #Way

I always hated those fantasy books where, at the end, all the kids had to go home. At the end of a Narnia book, you always got shown the door. Same with The Wizard Of Oz and The Phantom Tollbooth. You get kicked out of your magic land. It's like, "By the way, here's your next surprise: You get to go home!" And the kids are all like, "Yay, we get to go home!" I never bought that. Did anybody buy that?
-- Lev Grossman

#Book #Home #Kids

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!
-- Lev Grossman

#Other Worlds #Contentment #Obsessed

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#Healthy #World #Way

It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.
-- Lev Grossman

#Loss #Lost #Mourn

The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.
-- Lev Grossman

#Process

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#Annoyed #Enough #Should

Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up.
-- Lev Grossman

#Giving Up #Giving #Brave

And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.
-- Lev Grossman

#Bored #Age #Young

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#Attitude #Book #Sacred

Quentin had an obsolete sailing ship that had been raised from the dead. He had psychotically effective swordsman and an enigmatic witch-queen. It wasn't the Fellowship of the Ring, but then again he wasn't trying to save the world from Sauron, he was trying to perform a tax audit on a bunch of hick islanders…
-- Lev Grossman

#Queens #Sailing #Trying

When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt’s house and slip through into Fillory...it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better.
-- Lev Grossman

#Book #Dark #Aunt

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#Self Esteem #Funny Things #Giving

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.
-- Lev Grossman

#Hero #Men #Knowing

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
-- Lev Grossman

#Hero #Relief #Stories

That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.
-- Lev Grossman

#Children #Games #Bullshit

A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can’t be how the universe works.” “In the Order we call it ‘inverse profundity.’ We’ve observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.
-- Lev Grossman

#Numbers #Order #Interesting

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

#Magic #Mind #World

It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.
-- Lev Grossman

#Thinking #Water #Scary

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#People #Effort #Brain

Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?
-- Lev Grossman

#Book #Wings #Flying

She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master.
-- Lev Grossman

#Crush #Song #Dog

Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.
-- Lev Grossman

#Careful #Hunts

He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
-- Lev Grossman

#Doe #Quests

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.
-- Lev Grossman

#Running #Fear #Teenager

More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn't afraid of looking uncool - he wasn't scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.
-- Lev Grossman

#Writing #Optimistic #Rays

It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.
-- Lev Grossman

#Children #Childhood #Assuming

People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
-- Lev Grossman

#Book #People #Want

The real world is horrible.
-- Lev Grossman

#Real #World #Real World

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

#Writing #Special #Firsts

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We're increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.
-- Lev Grossman

#Stars #Real #Ideas

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
-- Lev Grossman

#Soul #Glimpse #Looks

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#People #Together #Different

A magician is strong because he feels the pain between what the world is and what he would make of it.
-- Lev Grossman

#Strong #Pain #World

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

#Hero #Brave #Should

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#Real #Doors #Waiting

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

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

#Mistake #Choices #Pennies

One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.
-- Lev Grossman

#Country #Writing #Practice

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#Hatred #Humanity #Mind

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#Smart #Perfect #Pages

In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't.
-- Lev Grossman

#Life #Clueless #Our World

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

#Writing #Able

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.
-- Lev Grossman

#Book #Years #Sky

I studied the cello for a long time, from when I was little up through college.
-- Lev Grossman

#College #Long #Littles

I think every fantasy reader secretly believes they know how magic works.
-- Lev Grossman

#Believe #Thinking #Magic

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#Thanks #Publishing #Stills

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.
-- Lev Grossman

#Country #House #England

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

#Literature #Great Things #Feels

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

#Book #Like You #Terrible

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

#Book #Adults #Groups

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

#Book

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 Grossman

#Majority #Forgotten #Ends

I recognize that on paper, you can't really tell that I'm a fan or a nerd.
-- Lev Grossman

#Nerd #Fans #Paper

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

#Writing #Magician