Lev Grossman Quotes

I began to be impressed by what made a good book-how you needed to have a sensible story, a plot that developed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that would tie everything together.

People are not really that forgiving when they pay for tickets to come see you and you don't show up.

As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.

You get to the end of something, you're laughing, you're like, 'That's funny, and that's funny,' and then you get to the end, and the credits come down, and you're like, 'That's it?! That's the whole thing?! You had me here for that?!' I just don't want to do that.

If there are occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and my joy bell lost its resonance, please forgive me. Charge it to my head and not to my heart.

I get fed up with plots that are driven by someone constantly getting information on a computer.

Jo left me a few months ago for 10 days. I get this note: I'll come back when the real Ronnie comes back.

Jonathan Lethem's 10th novel, 'The Blot,' is engaging, entertaining, and sharp for its first two-thirds. Then it goes to hell.

We all hate those stories that end with 'And that's the story.'

As a child, I remember seeing what a struggle it was for both my parents to accommodate and adjust to the idea of not being together. They cared for each other deeply; they loved each other. They just couldn't stay together because they wanted different things from life and sometimes, it happens.

While problems in a film are fairly easy to identify, the sources of those problems are often extraordinarily difficult to assess. A mystifying plot twist or a less-than-credible change of heart in our main character is often caused by subtle underlying issues elsewhere in the story.

Sometimes as writers, we try and put narrative development above character development. We try to move our characters around like chess pieces that do our bidding. The problem with that is sometimes the characters do things they shouldn't do. Things that are inorganic.

Few books today are forgivable.

He knew he couldn't tell stories, that he always included extraneous details & tangents that interested only him.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

The damnable frustration of revenge. Revenge is for dreams...never for reality.

If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.

Now here's a good one: you're lying on your deathbed. You have one hour to live. Who is it, exactly, you have needed all these years to forgive?

I think one should forgive and remember .... If you forgive and forget in the usual sense, you're just driving what you remember into the subconscious; it stays there and festers. But to look, even regularly, upon what you remember and know you've forgiven is achievement.

Forgiving makes me feel free and light. I forgive everyone, including myself

I mean to say, whether a yarn is tall or small I like to hear it well told. I like to meet a man that can take in hand to tell a story and not make a balls of it while he's at it. I like to know where I am, do you know. Everything has a beginning and an end.

A true saving knowledge of sin is to be had only in the Lord Christ: in him may we see the desert of our iniquities.

Easter says to us that despite everything to the contrary, his will for us will prevail, love will prevail over hate, justice over injustice and oppression, peace over exploitation and bitterness.

In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

We should never underestimate the great power of the way of love which reaches that spark of good in the other person, always there no matter how deeply buried, and the person is disarmed.