Quotes by Lev Grossman

About Lev Grossman:

Lev Grossman is an American novelist and journalist, notably the author of the novels Warp (1997), Codex (2004), The Magicians (2009), The Magician King (2011), and The Magician's Land (2014). He is a senior writer and book critic for TIME.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

Lev Grossman

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.

Lev Grossman

I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary o...

Lev Grossman

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 b...

Lev Grossman

I’ve learned that the creative life may or may not be the apex of human civilization, but either way it’s not what I thought it was. It doesn’t make you special and sparkly. You don’t have to walk alone. You can work in an office — I’ve w...

Lev Grossman

Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized furt...

Lev Grossman

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.

Lev Grossman

The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn't love?

Lev Grossman

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

Lev Grossman

If my generation is remembered for anything, it will be as the last one that remembers the world before the Internet.

Lev Grossman

I just completed a long car trip on a Sunday in August with two small children, which believe me is enough to convince you that Samuel Beckett was right about everything.

Lev Grossman

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

Lev Grossman

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 definit...

Lev Grossman

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 l...

Lev Grossman

I killed the Google Alert I used to have on myself two years ago. I don’t need any more information about myself. I get more than enough of that just by being me.

Lev Grossman

I call the right axe Sorrow," she said. "You know what I call the left one?" "Happiness?" "Sorrow. I can't tell them apart.

Lev Grossman

I read obsessively when I'm writing. I think there are two kinds of fiction writers, those who read incessantly while they write and those who can't read at all, lest their individual voices get overwhelmed, or tainted somehow. I'm the first kind. To...

Lev Grossman

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: psych...

Lev Grossman

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

Lev Grossman

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

I've drunk Amazon's free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I'm not anti-Amazon, and I'm not pro-publishers either. I'm pro-books.

Lev Grossman

Author Bio

NameLev Grossman
DescriptionAmerican novelist, journalist
BornJune 26, 1969
ProfessionJournalist; Writer