Lev Grossman Quotes

I have heard talk and talk, but nothing is done.

I heat myself up over the fact that I am never going to be as good as I want to be.

For the moment and for some time great events have been denied me, forward action not come my way.

When you see somebody who's got a complaining personality, it usually means that they had some vision of what things could be, and they're constantly disappointed by that. I think that would be the camp that I would fall into - constantly horrified by the things people do.

I can't stand the kind of paralysis that some people fall into because they're not happy with the choices they've made.

I've got to be honest, with every job I do there's a part of me, that child in me, that goes, 'This is the one.' And it rarely actually is.

I assumed no one would ever listen to my music, and for quite a lot of years, I was right.

Sometimes it seemed like it was never good enough, no matter what I did.

For the first time in my life, in my mid-20s, I started to question things. Had I been deceived? I thought I had been destined for something great - to be Whitney Houston or Jennifer Holliday or Phylicia Rashad. I started to realize that a lot of people think that, and it doesn't happen for almost everyone.

When you stop for months and you come back, you try everything, and I worked so hard to get back but then you do it again and again and again. You disappoint yourself and other people at the club, the manager, everybody. You don't know how to get it right.

I'd have thought my particular brand of quirkiness, combined with sharp intelligence and a fine voice, would have yielded more. But it hasn't. Yet!

Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move forward. It is a loop-an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.

He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.

I've spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me.

I walked away a little disheartened, thinking, 'Oh well. I came a long way to meet the Wizard of Oz, but I guess I won't. Such is life.

If you are patient...and wait long enough...Nothing will happen

I always think I'm lazy, maybe I could do better, I could make more effort and I always have the feeling that there is a glass wall that I cannot get through. But maybe when I get through, then it's over.

All I wanted to do was be a hero... But do I ever get to be a hero? All I ever get to be is the stupid goat!" "Don't be discouraged, Charlie Brown... In this life we live, there are always some bitter pills to be swallowed..." "If it's all the same with you, I'd rather not renew my perscription!

Running to stand still -Lena

As long as you are convinced you have never done anything, you can never do anything.

If you stand still long enough, you'll get stuck.

I don't think I've reached perfection by any stretch of the imagination, but maybe someday I'll become a perfectionist.

That sucks, though," Wes said finally, his voice low. "You're just setting yourself up to fail, because you'll never get everything perfect." "Says who?" He just looked at me. "The world," he said, gesturing all around us, as if this party, this deck encompassed it all. "The universe. There's just no way. And why would you want everything to be perfect, anyway?" "I don't want everything to be perfect," I said. Just me, I thought. Somehow. "I just want—

My wanting to write books annihilates the original root impulse that would have me bravely and blunderingly working on them.

I was always in search of a perfect game and I never got it.