Lev Grossman

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn't make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart — reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn't care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn't. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.”

“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.”

“If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine.”

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

“Needless to say, that meant that the Braekbills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit screwed up.”

“This is a feeling that you had, Quentin,' she said. 'Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many ever experience. That's where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was.”

“Now that he was teaching Quentin could see why the faculty didn't bother trying to improve the climate. It kept people amazingly focused. … You could actually watch as the determination to seize the moment and live life to the fullest ebbed right out of them, and they resigned themselves to lonely, silent, indoor study instead.”

“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.”

“The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We’re increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.”

“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 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.”

“Becoming me was the greatest creative project of my life.”

“And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so tired sometimes. And because of everything her parents asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to.”

“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 truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?”

“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.”