Quotes from Lev Grossman

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.

It's no longer possible to simply build English country houses out of words, because they've already been so thoroughly described that all the applicable words have been used up, and one is forced to build them instead out of words recycled and scavenged from other descriptions of other country houses.

I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.

I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.

I think every fantasy reader secretly believes they know how magic works.

Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.

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.

I recognize that on paper, you can't really tell that I'm a fan or a nerd.

There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.

I studied the cello for a long time, from when I was little up through college.

And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.

I've read plenty of J.G. Ballard, but I'm not really a Ballardian. I've met Ballardians, and I know when I can't compete. I like Ballard in his relatively unchallenging apocalyptic mode: 'Vermilion Sands,' 'The Drowned World,' 'The Burning World,' 'The Crystal World.'

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.

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 it comes to true humility in the face of history, nothing beats complete silence.

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.

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.

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.

I love playing with the conventions of fantasy, and breaking rules, and crossing lines.

My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.

Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English.

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

Which is the healthier kind of literary diversity: an un-gate-kept self-published book world, run substantially through Amazon? Or our current book world, which is part-gate-kept, part-not, with many different publishers and retailers and platforms? I'm not smart enough to figure it out, but if I had to guess I'd guess the latter.