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" 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. "

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" 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.' "

Lev Grossman

Compete

World

" 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. "

Lev Grossman

Mind

Work

" It's not really possible to open 'The Casual Vacancy' without a lot of expectations both high and low crashing around in your brain and distorting your vision. There's no point pretending they're not there. "

" 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. "

" What surprised me about 'The Casual Vacancy' was not just how good it was, but the particular way in which it was good. "

Lev Grossman

Good

Just

" I have spent many, many hours reading J.K. Rowling's work. I am a known 'Harry Potter' fan. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Lev Grossman

Show

Game

" 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. "

Lev Grossman

Business

Trying

" I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books. "

" 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. "

" I'm happy to report that 'The New Press' is still in business to this day. But not thanks to me. I was a really bad publishing intern. "

" Hating a book is not unlike hating a person; in fact it's tempting to just go ahead and hate the author personally, by proxy, qua human being, except that I know that would be a mistake. "

" One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Lev Grossman

Love

Hated

" 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. "

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

Lev Grossman

Thing

Terrible

" I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years. "

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