Do not say “I think it’s my favorite book and will make the greatest movie since The Battleship Potemkin.” Something like this is much better: “Well, of course as you know I’m kind of new at this, I’ll probably never know as much as you guys, but of course I’ve read the book and I wrote my senior thesis on Movement in Contemporary Juvenile Fiction, and this will probably sound stupid, but when the train gets the toys across the mountain, I cried—I don’t mean buckets, but there were tears. I guess probably as literature it isn’t Alice in Wonderland, and this isn’t to knock Alice, but, well, it
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