Lev Grossman Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• 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

• 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

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

• 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.'

  Lev Grossman

  Kings, Book, Dark

• 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

  Lev Grossman (2015). “The Magicians Trilogy”, p.170, Penguin

• 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

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

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Like You, Terrible

• 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.

  Lev Grossman

  Country, Book, House

• 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.

  Lev Grossman

  Children, Book, Thinking

  "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.

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

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Adults, Groups

• 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.

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Contemporary Fiction, Stuff

  "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.

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

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Forgiving, Habit

• 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, Defined

• 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

• 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

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

  Lev Grossman

  Book, People, Want

• 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.

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Way, Lucky

• 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. '

  Lev Grossman

  Reading, Book, School

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

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Thinking, People

  Interview with Todd VanDerWerff, www.avclub.com. August 8, 2011.

• 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.

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Mets, Hated

• 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.

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Knuckles, Internet

• 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, Kids, Home

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

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

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Sanctity, Reverence

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

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Mean, Tired

• 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.

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Men, Jeeves

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