Lev Grossman Quotes

I grew up in wide-open spaces, but they didn't have the romantic history of the West.

I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.

I suppose I'm trying to build an architecture that's as timeless as possible, although we're all creatures of our age.

I cannot look at modern buildings without thinking of historical ones.

Downtown Toronto is a very good place to talk about the neutrality of modernist architecture. I'm sure this kind of box-building was interesting in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, but I think it's absolutely ridiculous to build like this in 2013.

It's unfortunate that a certain type of stripped-down classicism became the in-house architectural language for 20th-century fascism. Can an architectural language recover from such an association? Yes, I think it can, because in the end what you're talking about is a column and beam.

Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England.

As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.

When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn't even discovered yet.

At the Museum of Roman Art, the logic of the forms is very much modern. But in spite of that, the idea of the construction could be related to a historical time.

If you're not interested in history, if you're living for the day, you need some sort of cliche hook. I certainly don't think of myself as a cult anything. It's a strange thing to even consider pursuing.

The American order reveals a method that was largely the outcome of material necessity, as exemplified by the Colonial style and the grid.

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.

It doesn't sound too good to say I am the son of a landowner, so let us rather say I am the grandson of exploited Galician peasants.

When I started studying architecture, people would say, you know, 'Can you tell me why are all modern buildings so boring?' Because, like, people had this idea that in the good old days, architecture had, like, ornament and little towers and spires and gargoyles, and today, it just becomes very practical.

Anyone who writes anything on any subject is standing on the shoulders of 900 people who've come before you.

You might as well acknowledge what came before, because you can never do something wholly new. It's not unoriginal to make your references clear.

I think, in history, everything is about the remix.

Modernism is an outmoded way of thinking about design: it just doesn't reflect the way we live now. It always puts forward this idea that the past is irrelevant to tomorrow - and tomorrow is all that matters. But the past is part of who we are.

When you go back to the days when I was studying how to paint, some of the things that excited me most was to go into the Huntington Library and Gardens and to see the amazing pictures of the landed gentry.

He was of opinion that what we now vulgarly call the Gothick, ought properly and truly be named Saracenick Architecture refined by the Christians.

You can't escape the influence of architectural history.

As an architect, I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past-by precedent, thoughtfully considered...As an artist, I frankly write about what I like in architecture: complexity and contradiction. From what we find we like-what we are easily attracted to-we can learn much of what we really are.

Architecture is the work of nations