Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman is an American novelist and journalist, notably the author of the novels Warp, Codex, The Magicians, The Magician King, and The Magician's Land. He is a senior writer and book critic for TIME...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 June 1969
CountryUnited States of America
real doors waiting
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.
real hero sidekicks
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.
real world horrible
The real world is horrible.
stars real ideas
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.
real technology feelings
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.
meaningful real interesting
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.
inspirational real character
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.
course grad school took
I'm not a Dickens guy. In grad school I had to take at least one course on the Victorians, so I took The Later Dickens, because that was what there was.
good particular
What surprised me about 'The Casual Vacancy' was not just how good it was, but the particular way in which it was good.
bubble claimed fact inside key languages learn life literally several speak spent though trapped trying
Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English.
burning drowned plenty relatively
I've read plenty of J.G. Ballard, but I'm not really a Ballardian. I've met Ballardians, and I know when I can't compete. I like Ballard in his relatively unchallenging apocalyptic mode: 'Vermilion Sands,' 'The Drowned World,' 'The Burning World,' 'The Crystal World.'
hours known spent work
I have spent many, many hours reading J.K. Rowling's work. I am a known 'Harry Potter' fan.
low medium novel novels seems vast
It seems to me that the novel as a medium has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. By which I mean: there are a lot of novels published, but the vast majority of them don't represent major contributions to the medium.
books erased graduated job notes passages people sent year
The year after I graduated college I had a job in a library. When people underlined passages in the library books, or made notes in the margins, the books were sent to me. I erased the lines and the notes. Yes, that was my job.