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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.' "

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" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn't afraid of looking uncool - he wasn't scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

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

" 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

" 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 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. "

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. "

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

Lev Grossman

Thing

Terrible

" 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 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. "

" 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. "