Lev Grossman

What makes you think what happened to you on Earth wasn't an adventure?

He wanted to stick his finger in it and see what happened. Some story, some quest, started here, and he wanted to go on it. It felt fresh and clean and unsafe, nothing like the heavy warm lard of palace life. The protective plastic wrap had been peeled off

Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don__ have anything worth giving.

I killed the Google Alert I used to have on myself two years ago. I don__ need any more information about myself. I get more than enough of that just by being me.

By the standards of magical society they__ fallen at the first hurdle: they hadn__ had the basic good sense to keep their shit to themselves.

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.

The world was fucking awful. It was a wretched, desolate place, a desert of meaninglessness, a heartless wasteland, where horrific things happened all the time for no reason and nothing good lasted for long.He'd been right about the world, but he was wrong about himself. The world was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring - a moving oasis. He wasn't desolate, and he wasn't empty. He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it, that's what being a magician was. They weren't ordinary feelings - they weren't the tame, domesticated kind. Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.

Earth or Fillory, did it even matter? What was the huge conundrum? Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it.

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

In a way fighting was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.

Blue screen of death: she'd crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.

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

You don__ learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master.

You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.

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__e increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.

Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle. Shakespeare didn't invent Hamlet and King Lear; he plucked them from historical and literary sources. Writers weren't the originators of the stories they told; they were just the temporary curators of them. Real creation was something the gods did.All that has changed. Today the way we think of creativity is dominated by Romantic notions of individual genius and originality, and late-capitalist concepts of intellectual property, under which artists are businesspeople whose creations are the commodities they have for sale.

I__e learned that the creative life may or may not be the apex of human civilization, but either way it__ not what I thought it was. It doesn__ make you special and sparkly. You don__ have to walk alone. You can work in an office _ I__e worked in offices for the past 15 years and written five novels while doing it. The creative life is forgiving: You can betray it all you want, again and again, and no matter how many times you do, it will always take you back.