Lev Grossman Quotes

Each organism, no matter how simple or complex, has around it a sacred bubble of space, a bit of mobile territoriality which only a few other organisms are allowed to penetrate and then only for short periods of time.

I don't like having my space invaded.

This motion-picture muddle had distracted me from my writing.

This happens to me all the time: I think I'm working on one thing, but this other thing, whether I want it to or not, keeps coming through.

Great mischief comes from attempts to steady other people's altars

The glare of publicity on my private life threatens to undermine the effectiveness of the division of enforcement and of the Commission.

There are a lot of players who fiddle around with their towel in your shot or they get up out of their chair to see if a ball's on when you're about to play your shot.

The space where writing happens is a unique space that's hard to define, and when you're kicked out of it because you're travelling or distracted, it seems so elusive and hard to defend because you yourself doubt whether it existed.

There are times ... when any visitor - in person, by phone, by mail - is an intruder, a burglar, a space hogger, an oxygen taker, a chaos maker, a conflict inducer, a mood chaser, and a total drag.

Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their plowing of the soil. The horse works, all its muscles drawn tight like the strings on a double-bass, and a fly settles on his flanks and tickles and buzzes. And what does the fly buzz about? It scarcely knows itself; simply because it is restless and wants to proclaim: 'Look, I too am living on the earth. See, I can buzz, too, buzz about anything.'

Where I'm from, there's two things you don't mess with. You don't mess with a man's woman, or his hat DON'T TOUCH A MAN'S HAT!

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat.

I have an office in my house, with a comfy red print reading chair and a soft cream-colored desk. After I walk Winston the Wonder dog and have my breakfast, I head to my office. Every single day. Sometimes, when I'm working on revisions, I print off my manuscript and go to a coffee shop to work. But mostly you can find me in my office.

I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.

Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality. My wife. My friend. My lover. My outrageous and annoying computer personality who's about to be shut off at the behest of a half-crazy girl with OCD on a planet that I never heard of and how will I live without [her] when she's gone?

Its [Resistance] aim is to shove us away, distract us from doing our work.

I don't know where my ideas come from, but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.

I almost feel like its an obligation to not further the status quo if you become somebody with influence and exposure. I dont want to paint the same painting again. I dont want to make the same sculpture again. Why shouldnt a big movie studio be able to make those small independent kinds of pictures? Why not change it up?

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

Let me tell you about my day. I get up at 8 o'clock in the morning. At 8:30 am, I leave the house and I arrive at my office at 8:37. I stay in the office until 2 o'clock in the afternoon. I get in my Porsche and I'm home at 2:03 because the one-way streets make it faster for me to drive. And between 8:36 am and 2 pm, I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

Turn down the porn soundtrack! Trying to concentrate here!-Shane

The finest plans are always ruined by the littleness of those who ought to carry them out, for emperor himself can actually be nothing.

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.

When I am writing, I try to do it five hours a day but I spend about two of those just fooling around.

We're smart enough to know we need to live in groups to survive, but we're still animals and we needs lots of room. In the case of the male of the species we also probably need that-guy-over-there's space. And his wife and cow, too.