Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, science fiction and especially fantasy had such a stigma attached to them. I felt so punished and exiled for being devoted to these things. Lev Grossman Read Quote
I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years. Lev Grossman Read Quote
There’s a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell. Lev Grossman Read Quote
My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only. Lev Grossman Read Quote
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. Lev Grossman Read Quote
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 have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed. Lev Grossman Read Quote
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. Lev Grossman Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
