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Books Quotes by Lev Grossman

59 Books quotes by Lev Grossman

All Books quotes Lev Grossman’s page

Lev Grossman shares his love for rare books and the quiet calm they can bring. He compares the comfort of a favorite story to a steady drink, and he mentions the thrill of seeing yourself in a novel. He also warns how the pressure to like a book can feel terrible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Personally, I think the "Potter" books have too many adverbs and not enough sex.”

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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.…

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“She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the…

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I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector.…

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How often have I met and disliked writers whose books I love; and conversely, hated the books and then wound up liking…

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When I left college I thought - based on a staggeringly inadequate understanding of how the world worked - that I might…

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The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great,…

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I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they're actually…

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Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite…

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“Literature interprets the world, but it's also shaped by that world, and we're living through one of the greatest economic and technological…

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“5 1/2 centuries after its 1.0 release, the book is a surprisingly robust piece of information technology. Sure, its memory is relatively…

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“When he graduated he’d thought life was going to be like a novel, starring him on his own personal hero’s journey, and…

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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…

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“Drinks were a lot like books, really: it didn’t matter where you were, the contents of a vodka tonic were always more…

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I always hated those fantasy books where, at the end, all the kids had to go home. At the end of a…

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Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to…

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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…

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“Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The…

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“...In books there's always somebody standing by ready to say hey, the world's in danger, evil's on the rise, but if you're…

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“There are any number of reasons to want novels to survive. The way [Jonathan] Franzen thinks about it is that books can…

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“To make matters worse, some of the books had actually become migratory. In the nineteenth century Brakebills had appointed a librarian with…

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“That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread.”

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Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching…

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

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

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

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

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“All of human literature could just be a user’s guide to the multiverse!”

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

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

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The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind…

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A lot of young-adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded.…

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It seems to me that the novel as a medium has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. By which I mean: there are…

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More by Lev Grossman

“It was about damn time something happened.”

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…

“He was going to sign the papers and he was going to be a motherfucking magician.”

“Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up. Fatigue meant nothing when you actually wanted to suffer.”

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

“He wasn't in a safe little story where wrongs were automatically righted; he was still in the real world, where bad bitter things happened…

I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I…

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something…

About as close you can get to the perfect cerebral thriller: searingly smart, ridiculously funny, and fast as hell... I defy anybody to read…

“It's true," Eliot said. "Statistically, historically, and however else you want to look at it, you are almost never right. A monkey making life…

“God, I hope we don’t have to use that,” was all he said out loud. “Oh, come on, Quentina. We’re not looking for trouble.…

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

My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don't buy the first edition, because those…

I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I…

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,…