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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.

-Lev Grossman

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In Our World No

Lev Grossman

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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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 Real World Is Horrible.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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Crossing The Line

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

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