Lev Grossman Quotes

I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that it's to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.

Composing was more difficult than writing things down.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile.

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.

It is horrible to sit in front of the keyboard and write those scenes because you're losing too. You lose somebody you enjoy working with.

Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

Those who create are hard of heart.

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.

You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.

I seldom know what I'm going to write when I sit down. There isn't much agony and sweat of the human spirit involved in doing it. The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult.

I don't know of a great artist who did not sacrifice and thereby have to wrestle with the depths of loneliness and sadness.

When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

Do you have to have emotional turmoil to create music? I'm not sure because I've never been without it

I let a good many mistakes show through when fixing my sensations. It will always be the same and this is what makes me despair.

When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board.

I had to do this album. I tried thinking, "I'm not going to do it." But then I'm sitting there getting all suicidal and depressed, and I just start writing. It's like this inner drive. If I could choose, I would probably be living in the countryside and be fine with that, but I'm not.

I think many writers write because it's a convenient way to explain themselves to themselves. We take the chaos and the turmoil and the bullshit of our lives, and we make it into something that has a harmonious shape and sound.

At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.

It may be observed of good writing, as of good blood, that it is much easier to say what it is composed of than to compose it.