Lev Grossman Quotes

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because, to some degree, I projected upon it.

'Aura' is a song where you're looking at yourself in the mirror, and I was personally impacted when I recorded it. I identified with it.

I have a photograph of myself when I was 2 years of age, and I don't recognize the person in the photograph. She doesn't look anything like me, and I can't find any trace of her in me physically. And yet I remember her very, very well - even her anxiety.

When characters change on screen, it makes you feel better about yourself. You think, 'Oh I change too, I'm constantly becoming a better person.'

I think if a character appeals to you, there are certain parts of yourself will come to the fore and other parts that will play down.

I didn't want to make cinema so a person forgets himself and has a lot of fun. 'I forget myself, I am a little poor consumer.' I wanted to make a picture where someone who sees it say, 'This is me! This is me!'

Call it egotistical or narcissist, but I think that's what we all look for in books - the right stories that help us make sense of the world that we, on a very personal level, live in every day.

I have this belief that we are so vulnerable when we open ourselves up to literature. We're reminded of these real parts of ourselves.

I'm trying to look into each character and try to realize her as someone who is also me.

I think people will discover themselves in 'Ankahee.'

'Blue is the Warmest Colour' - I'm not a lesbian, I'm not French, I'm not a woman, but I saw so much of myself in those women and in those characters. I saw different parts of myself than I ever would've seen if I hadn't seen that film.

It's super dope when you connect with something personally.

I have a great family by the way, but you need to find people who can pull something out from you that might be otherwise unseen.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

Being a teen is past for me. Worrying about the world and my place in it is not.

I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.

I'm not someone who is driven by big external stories. I like big emotional stories.

I like movies that instill passion in the viewer. I like movies that can teach us about who we are as people.

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

I look for characters that speak to something in me.

People are people, and they want to know about their own experiences.

Beyond just writing about falling in love and out of love and wanting to do certain things and going out and partying and all the things that I grew up writing about, I want to write about deeper things.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

The ideal way to approach a character is to find something in yourself that relates in some way.

A great epiphany: I found out that I'm totally confused and I'm good with that. I'm consistently inconsistent. I'm all of the above. I'm OK. I'm a work in progress. That's my next tattoo somewhere.