Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman is an American novelist and journalist, notably the author of the novels Warp, Codex, The Magicians, The Magician King, and The Magician's Land. He is a senior writer and book critic for TIME...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 June 1969
CountryUnited States of America
way tribes east
I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.
reader booksellers
Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.
attitude book sacred
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.
healthy world way
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.
bored age young
And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.
book forgiving habit
A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.
relationship heart desire
I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.
strength pain mean
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.
weekend espresso six
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.
play numbers unbroken
It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.
majority forgotten ends
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.
moving needs want
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.
kings book dark
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.'
writing important tables
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.