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.

Lev Grossman

Categorized in : Book Dark Aunt

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.

Lev Grossman

real inspirational character

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

Lev Grossman

about-yourself people

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.

Lev Grossman

life-lesson lessons wish

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.

Lev Grossman

strange firsts thinking

You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

Lev Grossman

quests wanted

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.

Lev Grossman

media literature writing

It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.

Lev Grossman

mourn loss lost

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.

Lev Grossman

fantasy asking way

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

Lev Grossman

matter home book

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.

Lev Grossman

expectations way world

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.

Lev Grossman

annoyed enough should

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.

Lev Grossman

important tables writing

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!

Lev Grossman

other-worlds obsessed contentment

Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.

Lev Grossman

writing-advice writing advice

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.

Lev Grossman

pain strong hurt

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.

Lev Grossman

want moving needs

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.

Lev Grossman

order believe book

The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

Lev Grossman

process

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.

Lev Grossman

excited wonderful giving

It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.

Lev Grossman

unbroken play numbers