Lev Grossman Quotes

I don't see much of myself in the traditional Western hero.

We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes

I have a problem with being a hero, but that's another problem.

The young women seem to think that they can only go out with or marry a man who is superior to them. The problem there is that they are wanting to be defeated, as opposed to finding a partner.

I am, to be quite honest, sick of hero stories.

I used to think I actually was Batman.

We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too.

I have this theory- that if we're told we're bad, then that's the only ideal we'll ever have.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

I never doubted my ability, but when you hear all your life you're inferior, it makes you wonder if the other guys have something you've never seen before. If they do, I'm still looking for it.

I feel uncomfortable because I'm insecure about who I am.

I think living in our culture right now, there's a universal experience where we feel like we become what we do. Sometimes that's rewarding and sometimes that creates an existential crisis.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of their own imagination.

A hero that doesn't look like you makes you want to be something else.

I think you have to kind of feel like you're pretty handsome and cool to be able to step into an audition for some kind of lead hero, and that's just not how I look.

When I was playing Ajax, he thinks he's a hero; he thinks he's saving people. He thinks he's helping Wade Wilson by turning him into Deadpool.

Marvel heroes, at their core, are people who are damaged, are people that are trying to figure out who they are in life. And that doesn't matter whether or not they're X-Men characters or they're Matt Murdock or they're Tony Stark or they're Peter Parker... That's where it starts.

Nobody aspires to be a backup. And although I take great pride in the supporting roles I've played in both Philadelphia and Kansas City, part of me still cringes every time I hear myself described that way. Not only is it limiting and one-dimensional, it doesn't come close to describing who I really am.

I was worried that all the corners of the earth had been explored, all the great battles fought. The famous people on TV were athletes and actresses and singers. What did they stand for? I wondered: Had the time for heroes passed?

Heroes, notwithstanding the high ideas which, by the means of flatterers, they may entertain of themselves, or the world may conceive of them, have certainly more of mortal than divine about them.

I come from an overly confident place. But I'm overconfident because of feelings of inferiority.

Horrible experiences lead us to wonder whether the person who experiences them might not be something horrible.

It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.

The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.... He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself.