Lev Grossman 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.

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.259, Penguin

Topics: Inspirational, Real, Character, Secret Doors

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Writing, Media, Looks, Pop Culture, Bunkers

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.

Topics: Asking, Way, Fantasy

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.

Topics: Writing, Important, Tables, Exciting Things

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.

Topics: Moving, Needs, Want

Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Believe, Book, Order, Banned Books, Censored

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.

Topics: Thinking, Firsts, Strange, 21st Century, Great Novels

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.

source: - Interview with Jason Heller, www.avclub.com. August 26, 2009.

Topics: Dragons, Cartoon, Dungeons, Phantom Tollbooth, Chronicles

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.

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.387, Penguin

Topics: 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?

Topics: Book, Home, Kids, Yay, Phantom Tollbooth

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!

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.456, Penguin

Topics: 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.

Topics: Healthy, World, Way, Escapism

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

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.293, Penguin

Topics: Loss, Lost, Mourn

The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

source: - Lev Grossman (2009). “The Magicians: A Novel”, p.55, Penguin

Topics: 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.

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.560, Penguin

Topics: Annoyed, Enough, Should

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

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.298, Penguin

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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…

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.353, Penguin

Topics: Queens, Sailing, Trying, Hicks, Quentin

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

Topics: Hero, Relief, Stories, Comic Relief

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

Topics: Magic, Mind, World

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.

Topics: 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?

Topics: Book, Wings, Flying, Fluttering

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.

Topics: Crush, Song, Dog

Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.

Topics: Careful, Hunts

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

source: - Lev Grossman (2011). “The Magician King: A Novel”, p.251, Penguin

Topics: 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.

Topics: Running, Fear, Teenager, Physical Violence

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.

Topics: Writing, Optimistic, Rays, Uncool, Bradbury

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

Topics: Children, Childhood, Assuming

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

Topics: Book, People, Want

The real world is horrible.

Topics: Real, World, Real World

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Stars, Real, Ideas, Stone Cold, Snooki

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: People, Together, Different, Web 2.0

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

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.173, Penguin

Topics: Strong, Pain, World

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.

Topics: Real, Doors, Waiting

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

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Country, Writing, Practice, Anachronism

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.

Topics: Hatred, Humanity, Mind, Future Of Humanity

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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Life, Clueless, Our World

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Book, Years, Sky

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

Topics: College, Long, Littles

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Country, House, England, Country Houses

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

Topics: Literature, Great Things, Feels

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

Topics: Book, Like You, Terrible

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

Topics: Book, Adults, Groups, Young Adult

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Majority, Forgotten, Ends

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

Topics: Nerd, Fans, Paper

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

Topics: Writing, Magician

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.

source: - Lev Grossman (2009). “The Magicians: A Novel”, p.216, Penguin

Topics: Life Lesson, Wish, Lessons, Life Teaches

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

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.478, Penguin

Topics: Quests, Wanted

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

Topics: People, About Yourself

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.

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.245, Penguin

Topics: Past, Play, Would Be

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

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.612, Penguin

Topics: Book, Home, Matter, Halfway Home

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.

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.533, Penguin

Topics: Order, Numbers, Interesting, Janitor, Profundity

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.

source: - "Goodreads" interview, www.goodreads.com. August, 2009.

Topics: Meaningful, Real, Interesting

The 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.

source: - "INTERVIEW: Lev Grossman on Writing ‘The Magician King’, Narnia and the Line Between SF and Fantasy". Interview with Andrew Liptak, www.sfsignal.com. August 17, 2011.

Topics: Book, Contemporary Fiction, Stuff, Vantage Point, Reviewers

There is really no end to life's little humiliations.

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.79, Penguin

Topics: Littles, Ends, Humiliation

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

Topics: Reading, Fans, Potters

I'm now much more excited about genre distinctions. What I still see breaking down are more the hierarchical arrangements of genres. That is, "There is literary fiction, and then there are lesser genres." I'm much more clear on the idea that literary fiction is itself a genre. It is not above other genres. It is down there in the muck with all the other genres, and it's doing the wonderful things that it does, but to give it a Y-axis, to make it high and low, just seems absurd. I stand by that.

Topics: Giving, Wonderful, Excited

I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.

source: - "INTERVIEW: Lev Grossman on Writing ‘The Magician King’, Narnia and the Line Between SF and Fantasy". Interview with Andrew Liptak, www.sfsignal.com. August 17, 2011.

Topics: Doubt, Serial Killer, Killers

Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.225, Penguin

Topics: Intelligent, Tree, Would Be

Most people are blind to magic. They move thru a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing and they’re dead before they die.

source: - Lev Grossman (2009). “The Magicians: A Novel”, p.88, Penguin

Topics: Moving, People, Bored

Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.

source: - Lev Grossman (2009). “The Magicians: A Novel”, p.173, Penguin

Topics: Strength, Pain, Mean

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.

source: - Lev Grossman (2009). “The Magicians: A Novel”, p.5, Penguin

Topics: Errors, Should, Bureaucracy

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

source: - Lev Grossman (2009). “The Magicians: A Novel”, p.200, Penguin

Topics: Hate, Parent, Promise, Quentin

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.

source: - Lev Grossman (2009). “The Magicians: A Novel”, p.320, Penguin

Topics: Strong, Contradiction, Weak, Diminish

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. '

Topics: Reading, Book, School, Graduate School, Literary Theory

I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that's just what people did where I grew up.

Topics: School, College, Years, Comparative Literature

I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.

Topics: Book, Mean, Tired, Book Review, Tired Of Life

His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he'd gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.57, Penguin

Topics: Crush, Depressing, Relief, Terminal, Temporary Relief

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.

Topics: Mother, Thinking, Facts

A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.

Topics: Book, Forgiving, Habit

I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.

Topics: Relationship, Heart, Desire

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.

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.257, Penguin

Topics: Pain, Fall, Fighting

I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.

Topics: Book, Sanctity, Reverence

I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.

Topics: Way, Tribes, East

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.

Topics: Book, Way, Lucky

I'm not one of your knockabout, knuckle-scarred, Internet-controversy-courting book critics. Occasionally I stumble into controversy accidentally, but not because I enjoy it. It's probably just because I'm a weird person.

Topics: Book, Knuckles, Internet

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.

Topics: Book, Mets, Hated

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.

Topics: Weekend, Espresso, Six, Binge

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.

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.16, Penguin

Topics: Real, Hero, Sidekicks

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.

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.16, Penguin

Topics: Feelings, Done, Want

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.

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.369, Penguin

Topics: Self Esteem, Funny Things, Giving

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

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.246, Penguin

Topics: Ignorance, Neglect, Rulers

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.

Topics: Book, Dark, Aunt

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.

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.575, Penguin

Topics: Thinking, Water, Scary, Cold Water

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

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.89, Penguin

Topics: Personality, Whole, Jokes

The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?

source: - Lev Grossman (2009). “The Magicians: A Novel”, p.378, Penguin

Topics: Doe, Stories, Good Story

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

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.243, Penguin

Topics: Past, Long, Great Day

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

Topics: Growing Up, Fun, People

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.

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.566, Penguin

Topics: Children, Games, Bullshit

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

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.560, Penguin

Topics: Hero, Brave, Should, Being A Hero

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

source: - Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.383, Penguin

Topics: Hero, Men, Knowing

It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.

Topics: Easy, Turns

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.

Topics: Book, Men, Jeeves

Nothing is wrong with you. You're not different. Everybody feels as bad as you do: this is just what writing a novel feels like. To write a novel is to come in contact with raw, primal feelings, hopes and longings and psychic wounds, and try to make a big public word-sculpture out of them, and that is a crazy hard thing to do.

Topics: Crazy, Writing, Psychics

Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.

Topics: Reader, Booksellers

I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game.

source: - "The Exchange: Lev Grossman" by Andrea Walkman, www.newyorker.com. August 27, 2009.

Topics: Coffee, Writing, Games

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.'

Topics: Kings, Book, Dark, Early 20s, Family Vacation

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.

Topics: Country, Book, House, Heyday, Country Houses

As a writer I'm more drawn to villains who are just slightly mad.

source: - "INTERVIEW: Lev Grossman on Writing ‘The Magician King’, Narnia and the Line Between SF and Fantasy". Interview with Andrew Liptak, www.sfsignal.com. August 17, 2011.

Topics: Mad, Villain

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

source: - "INTERVIEW: Lev Grossman on Writing ‘The Magician King’, Narnia and the Line Between SF and Fantasy". Interview with Andrew Liptak, www.sfsignal.com. August 17, 2011.

Topics: Crossing The Line, Lines, Breaking Rules

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.

source: - "INTERVIEW: Lev Grossman on Writing ‘The Magician King’, Narnia and the Line Between SF and Fantasy". Interview with Andrew Liptak, www.sfsignal.com. August 17, 2011.

Topics: Important, Fantasy, Genre

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.

source: - "INTERVIEW: Lev Grossman on Writing ‘The Magician King’, Narnia and the Line Between SF and Fantasy". Interview with Andrew Liptak, www.sfsignal.com. August 17, 2011.

Topics: Real, Technology, Feelings

The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that's something people are looking for.

source: - "INTERVIEW: Lev Grossman on Writing ‘The Magician King’, Narnia and the Line Between SF and Fantasy". Interview with Andrew Liptak, www.sfsignal.com. August 17, 2011.

Topics: People, Lines, Fantasy

Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it's much too late.

source: - "INTERVIEW: Lev Grossman on Writing ‘The Magician King’, Narnia and the Line Between SF and Fantasy". Interview with Andrew Liptak, www.sfsignal.com. August 17, 2011.

Topics: Magic, Too Late, Stuff

I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.

source: - "INTERVIEW: Lev Grossman on Writing ‘The Magician King’, Narnia and the Line Between SF and Fantasy". Interview with Andrew Liptak, www.sfsignal.com. August 17, 2011.

Topics: White, Important, Influence

When I was 35 I realized that I was still thinking a lot about what it would be like to go to Narnia. To really go - not just in a daydream, or in a children's book, but what it would actually feel like, physically, psychologically, every other way. The idea was haunting me.

source: - "INTERVIEW: Lev Grossman on Writing ‘The Magician King’, Narnia and the Line Between SF and Fantasy". Interview with Andrew Liptak, www.sfsignal.com. August 17, 2011.

Topics: Children, Book, Thinking

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.

source: - "INTERVIEW: Lev Grossman on Writing ‘The Magician King’, Narnia and the Line Between SF and Fantasy". Interview with Andrew Liptak, www.sfsignal.com. August 17, 2011.

Topics: Thinking, Long, Perfect, Paralyzed