Quotes from Lev Grossman

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.

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.

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.

A lot of young-adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit, and not for lack of trying.

I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.

It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

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

You're saying the gods don't have free will." "The power to make mistakes," Penny said. "Only we have that. Mortals

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.

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.

I never thought about doing a sequel when I was actually writing 'The Magicians.' I only ever considered it a standalone.

The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

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.

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

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.

It's a terrible thing for a book, when you feel like you're supposed to like it.

When I left college I thought - based on a staggeringly inadequate understanding of how the world worked - that I might like to go into book publishing.

When I got to college I simply decided that I could speak French, because I just could not spend any more time in French classes. I went ahead and took courses on French literature, some of them even taught in French.

The real world is horrible.

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.

There is really no end to life's little humiliations.

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 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 on Saturday morning in the '80s.

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. '