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I Love Playing With The Conventions Of Fantasy, And Breaking Rules, And Crossing Lines.

-Lev Grossman

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I Love Playing With

Lev Grossman

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I Love Playing With The Conventions Of Fantasy, And Breaking Rules, And Crossing Lines.

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Crossing The Line

More From Lev Grossman

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.

Contemporary Fiction

Supposedly I've Got Traces Of An English Accent, Though I Can't Hear It. I Must Have Inherited It From My Mother, Who's English, And Then I Think It Was Exacerbated By The Fact That I Live With An Australian.

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.

Careful What You Hunt, Lest You Catch It.

The Real World Is Horrible.

The Truth Doesn't Always Make A Good Story, Does It?

Being A Hero, The Man Had Observed, Is Largely A Matter Of Knowing One’s Cues.

A Novel With A Bad Middle Is A Bad Book. A Bad Ending Is Something I've Just Gotten In The Habit Of Forgiving.

Magic Is Wild, Dangerous Stuff. You Never Realize How Useful Limitations Are Until It's Much Too Late.

We Have Lived Too Long. The Great Days Are Past.

Being A Writer Can Be Isolating. It's Good To Be Among Readers And Booksellers.

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.

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.

I Love Playing With The Conventions Of Fantasy, And Breaking Rules, And Crossing Lines.

Crossing The Line

I Went To College At Harvard, Then Did Three Years Of Graduate School At Yale. At Both Places I Studied Comparative Literature. People Find It Odd That I Went To Both Harvard And Yale, And I Guess It Is Odd, But That's Just What People Did Where I Grew Up.

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.

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.

It Turns Out That There Is Something That Can Compete With Free: Easy.

I Studied The Cello For A Long Time, From When I Was Little Up Through College.

Genuinely Social People Never Ceased To Amaze Him. Their Brains Seemed To Generate An Inexhaustible Fund Of Things To Say, Naturally, With No Effort, Out Of Nothing At All.

A Magician Is Strong Because He Feels The Pain Between What The World Is And What He Would Make Of It.

I Came From An Anxious, Overly Intense East Coast Academic Family. That Was The Way Of Our Tribe.

I Recognize That On Paper, You Can't Really Tell That I'm A Fan Or A Nerd.

My Ultimate Goal Is To Drive People Back To The Books, When I Think Of An Adaptation.

It's Very Important, At Least To Me As A Writer, That There Be Some Rules On The Table When I'm Writing. Rules Come From Genres. You're Writing In A Genre, There Are Rules, Which Is Great Because Then You Can Break The Rules. That's When Really Exciting Things Happen.

In Our World No One Ever Knows What To Do, And Everyone's Just As Clueless And Full Of Crap As Everyone Else, And You Have To Figure It All Out By Yourself. And Even After You've Figured It Out And Done It, You'll Never Know Whether You Were Right Or Wrong. You'll Never Know If You Put The Ring In The Right Volcano, Or If Things Might Have Gone Better If You Hadn't.

I Read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Which I Think Will Subsequently Be Recognized As One Of The First Great Novels Of The 21st Century.

As A Writer I'm More Drawn To Villains Who Are Just Slightly Mad.

You Don’t Learn About Yourself By Being Alone, You Learn About Yourself From Other People.

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?

Most People Are Blind To Magic. They Move Thru A Blank And Empty World. They’re Bored With Their Lives And There’s Nothing They Can Do About It. They’re Eaten Alive By Longing And They’re Dead Before They Die.

Some Of The Comments On Youtube Make You Weep For The Future Of Humanity Just For The Spelling Alone, Never Mind The Obscenity And The Naked Hatred.

It's Natural For A Child To Assume That His Or Her Own Childhood Is Unremarkable.

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.

It Was So Much Easier To Be Angry. Being Angry Made Him Feel Strong, Even Though-- And This Contradiction Did Nothing To Diminish His Anger-- He Was Angry Only Because His Position Was So Weak.

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.

You're Saying The Gods Don't Have Free Will." "the Power To Make Mistakes," Penny Said. "only We Have That. Mortals

I Feel That's One Of The Central Questions Of Fantasy. What Did We Lose When We Entered The 20th And 21st Century, And How Can We Mourn What We Lost, And What Can We Replace It With? We're Still Asking Those Questions In An Urgent Way.

I Used To Write In A Local Coffee Shop, But There Was Another Guy, Another Writer, Who Kept Sitting In My Favorite Seat. I Would Show Up, And He Would Be There, And I Would Get Exiled To A Couch Or Something, And It Would Throw Me Off My Game.

It Didn’t Matter Where You Were, If You Were In A Room Full Of Books You Were At Least Halfway Home.

Quentin Had An Obsolete Sailing Ship That Had Been Raised From The Dead. He Had Psychotically Effective Swordsman And An Enigmatic Witch-queen. It Wasn't The Fellowship Of The Ring, But Then Again He Wasn't Trying To Save The World From Sauron, He Was Trying To Perform A Tax Audit On A Bunch Of Hick Islanders.

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.

The Process Of Learning Is A Nonstop Orgy Of Wonderment.

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.

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 Learned To Break The World That Has Tried To Break You.

The Novel Is A Highly Corrupt Medium, After All - In The End The Vast Majority Of Them Simply Aren't That Great, And Are Destined To Be Forgotten.

It's Time To Live With What We Have And Mourn What We Lost.

We Have Reached The Point Where Ignorance And Neglect Are The Best We Can Hope For In A Ruler.

Being Brave Was Easy When You Would Rather Die Than Give Up.

My Book Group Has One Rule: No Books For Adults. We Read Young Adult Fiction Only.

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.

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.

I Got My Heart's Desire, And There My Troubles Began.

The Life I Should Be Living Had Been Mislaid Through Some Clerical Error By The Cosmic Bureaucracy.

People - Me Included - Want To Get Excited About Books. Good Books Are A Good Thing.

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.

The Danger Would Be Going Back, Or Staying Still. The Only Way Out Was Through. The Past Was Ruins, But The Present Was Still In Play.

She Still Had Her Bad Days, No Question, When The Black Dog Of Depression Sniffed Her Out And Settled Its Crushing Weight On Her Chest And Breathed Its Pungent Dog Breath In Her Face. On Those Days She Called In Sick To The It Shop Where, Most Days, She Untangled Tangled Networks For A Song. On Those Days She Pulled Down The Shades And Ran Dark For Twelve Or Twenty-four Or Seventy-two Hours, However Long It Took For The Black Dog To Go On Home To Its Dark Master.

She Tortured Everybody Around Her, But Only Because She Was More Tortured Than Anyone.

I Never Thought About Doing A Sequel When I Was Actually Writing 'the Magicians.' I Only Ever Considered It A Standalone.

Escapism Has Value, Even If I Don't Know What Its Value Is, Exactly. Maybe It's Just Part Of Some Healthy Way That We Deal With The World.

It's A Terrible Thing For A Book, When You Feel Like You're Supposed To Like It.

His Whole Personality Was Like An Elaborate Joke That He Never Stopped Telling.

You Don't Want To Move Toward Some Utopian Literary Situation Where Everybody's Free Of All Conventions. That's Ridiculous! Conventions Are What You Need. You Have Nothing To Break Down If You Don't Have Conventions.

There's A Special Gut-check Moment The First Time You Write A Scene In Which Somebody Casts A Spell.

About As Close You Can Get To The Perfect Cerebral Thriller: Searingly Smart, Ridiculously Funny, And Fast As Hell... I Defy Anybody To Read The First Page And Not Keep Going To The Last.

That’s What Death Did, It Treated You Like A Child, Like Everything You Had Ever Thought And Done And Cared About Was Just A Child’s Game, To Be Crumpled Up And Thrown Away When It Was Over. It Didn’t Matter. Death Didn’t Respect You. Death Thought You Were Bullshit, And It Wanted To Make Sure You Knew It.

By Now He Had Learned Enough To Know That When He Was Getting Annoyed At Somebody Else, It Was Usually Because There Was Something That He Himself Should Be Doing, And He Wasn't Doing It.

I'm Now Much More Excited About Genre Distinctions. What I Still See Breaking Down Are More The Hierarchical Arrangements Of Genres. That Is, "there Is Literary Fiction, And Then There Are Lesser Genres." I'm Much More Clear On The Idea That Literary Fiction Is Itself A Genre. It Is Not Above Other Genres. It Is Down There In The Muck With All The Other Genres, And It's Doing The Wonderful Things That It Does, But To Give It A Y-axis, To Make It High And Low, Just Seems Absurd. I Stand By That.

I Have Spent Many, Many Hours Reading J.k. Rowling's Work. I Am A Known 'harry Potter' Fan.

I Think For A Long Time, I Was Paralyzed By Some Of My Hopes And Ideals For What My Life Was Going To Be Like. I Had This Perfect Vision Of How My Life Should Go, But It Seemed - It Was - Impossible To Realize, So I Sat Around For A Long, Long Time Doing Almost Nothing At All.

If There's A Single Lesson That Life Teaches Us, It's That Wishing Doesn't Make It So.

Josh Speculated About The Hypothetical Contents Of An Imaginary Porn Magazine For Intelligent Trees That Would Be Entitled Enthouse.

A Big Silvery Janitor. Penny, This Can’t Be How The Universe Works.” “in The Order We Call It ‘inverse Profundity.’ We’ve Observed It In Any Number Of Cases. The Deeper You Go Into The Cosmic Mysteries, The Less Interesting Everything Gets.

A Magician Is Strong Because He Feels Pain. He Feels The Difference Between What The World Is And What He Would Make Of It. Or What Did You Think That Stuff In Your Chest Was? A Magician Is Strong Because He Hurts More Than Others. His Wound Is His Strength.

Oddly, The Meanings Of Books Are Defined For Me Much More By Their Beginnings And Middles Than They Are By Their Endings.

I Think Every Fantasy Reader Secretly Believes They Know How Magic Works.

In A Way Fighting Was Just Like Using Magic. You Said The Words, And They Altered The Universe. By Merely Speaking You Could Create Damage And Pain, Cause Tears To Fall, Drive People Away, Make Yourself Feel Better, Make Your Life Worse.

You Didn’t Get The Quest You Wanted, You Got The One You Could Do.

Nothing Is Wrong With You. You're Not Different. Everybody Feels As Bad As You Do: This Is Just What Writing A Novel Feels Like. To Write A Novel Is To Come In Contact With Raw, Primal Feelings, Hopes And Longings And Psychic Wounds, And Try To Make A Big Public Word-sculpture Out Of Them, And That Is A Crazy Hard Thing To Do.

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.

It's An Engrossing Look At The Way The Flow Of Information Shapes History-as Well As A Rare Glimpse Into The Soul Of The Hardcore Geek

His Crush Went From Exciting To Depressing, As If He'd Gone From The First Blush Of Infatuation To The Terminal Nostalgia Of A Former Lover Without Even The Temporary Relief Of An Actual Relationship In Between.

Maybe This Was One Of Those Times When Being A Hero Didn’t Involve Looking Particularly Brave. It Was Just Doing What You Should.

There Is Really No End To Life's Little Humiliations.

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?

And I'm Not As Young As I Once Was. At My Age, I Don't Have Time To Be Bored.

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.

Don't Take Anyone's Writing Advice Too Seriously.

I've Stayed In Houses That Were In The Country, And In England, But I'm Still Not Sure That I've Stayed In An English Country House.

It's A Great Thing When You Feel That You Recognize Yourself, Deeply And Movingly, In A Work Of Literature.

He Wasn't Surprised. He Was Used To This Anticlimactic Feeling, Where By The Time You've Done All The Work To Get Something You Don't Even Want It Anymore.

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.

The New Web Is A Very Different Thing. It's A Tool For Bringing Together The Small Contributions Of Millions Of People And Making Them Matter. Silicon Valley Consultants Call It Web 2.0, As If It Were A New Version Of Some Old Software. But It's Really A Revolution.

I Feel Very Conscious Of My Influences. T.h. White Is Very Important For Me.

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. '

Fanfiction Is What Literature Might Look Like If It Were Reinvented From Scratch After A Nuclear Apocalypse By A Band Of Brilliant Pop-culture Junkies Trapped In A Sealed Bunker. They Don't Do It For Money. That's Not What It's About. The Writers Write It And Put It Up Online Just For The Satisfaction. They're Fans, But They're Not Silent, Couchbound Consumers Of Media. The Culture Talks To Them, And They Talk Back To The Culture In Its Own Language.

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.

It's Wonderful To Play Around With Fantasy, Because There Are An Amazing Number Of As-yet-unbroken Rules Out There.

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.

I Have No Doubt There Are Magician Psychopaths, And Magician Serial Killers. I Doubt Brakebills Admissions Is Very Good At Screening For Those.

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.'

You're All So Obsessed With Other Worlds, You're So Convinced That This One Is Crap And Everywhere Else Is Great, But You've Never Bothered To Figure Out What's Going On Here!

Everybody Wanted To Be The Hero Of Their Own Story. Nobody Wanted To Be Comic Relief.

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.

Do You Promise To Hate My Parents As Much As I Do?" "oh, Absolutely," Quentin Said. "maybe Even More.

The Line Between Outside And Inside Is Fuzzier In Fantasy. Maybe That's Something People Are Looking For.

I Guess I Was Raised In A Household With A Lot Of Reverence For The Physical Sanctity Of Books. You Didn't Destroy Books.

I'm A Fantasy Writer. I Don't Do Sf. This Is Important To Me. If You're Not Clear On What Genre You're In, Everything Gets Muddled, And It's Hard To Know Which Rules You're Breaking.

Though The Funny Thing About Never Being Asked For Anything Is That After A While You Start To Feel Like Maybe You Don’t Have Anything Worth Giving.

I Loved Fantasy, But I Particularly Loved The Stories In Which Somebody Got Out Of Where They Were And Into Somewhere Better - As In The Chronicles Of Narnia, The Wizard Of Oz, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Dungeons & Dragons Cartoon.

He Who Completes A Quest Does Not Merely Find Something. He Becomes Something.

As A Teenager In Brooklyn Quentin Had Often Imagined Himself Engaged In Martial Heroics, But After This He Knew, As A Cold Immutable Fact, That He Would Do Anything Necessary, Sacrificing Whatever Or Whomever He Had To, To Avoid Risking Exposure To Physical Violence. Shame Never Came Into It. He Embraced His New Identity As A Coward. He Would Run In The Other Direction. He Would Lie Down And Cry And Put His Arms Over His Head Or Play Dead. It Didn't Matter What He Had To Do, He Would Do It And Be Glad.

Read Everything. If You Haven't Read Everything, You'll Never Be Able To Write Anything.

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.

I Mean, When You're Tired Of Book Reviews, You're Tired Of Life.

More Than Fantasy Or Even Science Fiction, Ray Bradbury Wrote Horror, And Like So Many Great Horror Writers He Was Himself Utterly Without Fear, Of Anything. He Wasn't Afraid Of Looking Uncool - He Wasn't Scared To Openly Love Innocence, Or To Be Optimistic, Or To Write Sentimentally When He Felt That Way.

Magic: It Was What Happened When The Mind Met The World, And The Mind Won For A Change.

The Problem With Growing Up Is That Once You're Grown Up, The People Who Aren't Grown Up Aren't Fun Anymore.

That Was The Thing About The World: It Wasn't That Things Were Harder Than You Thought They Were Going To Be, It Was That They Were Hard In Ways That You Didn't Expect.

It Was Strange To Be Naked In Front Of Anybody. It Was Like That Cold Water Out There In The Bay: Scary, You Didn’t Think You Could Stand It, But Then You Plunged In And Pretty Soon You Got Used To It. There Was Enough Hiding In Life. Sometimes You Just Wanted To Show Somebody Your Tits.

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