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" A fragmented film such as 'Babel' gives the impression of 'edginess' but, in its form, tells us nothing we didn't already know. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

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" I'd been coming to New York for weekends since I was 17, and after 9/11, I started making these trips more frequently, just to make contact with the city. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" I had one week in the fall of 1996 where I was like, 'I'm America's greatest living teenage poet.' "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" The writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening - like, it feels like if you just listen hard enough, the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" Reading isn't about managing expectations. In certain ways, writing is. You're trying to send signals early in a book about what might be coming later, but I think worrying about the kind of chatter around a book is something I try and stay as far away from when I'm reading. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" I'm trying to focus on my job as I see it, which is to write the next thing and to remain, to the degree that I ever was, a noticer. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" I started coming up to New York at age 17. There was a girl I met over the summer somewhere; I was chasing her. I would drive up to D.C., where I had made some friends, which was about four hours away, and we would take the bus up to New York. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" I respect Billy Joel, but I'm not a guy who's gonna sit down and listen to the entire 'Essential Billy Joel.' "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" One of the ways I stuck out was I was a very passionate reader. There was probably a cyclical nature to that; the more I felt like an outcast, the more I sought refuge in books, and the more I sought refuge in books, the more it made me not speak the same language as my peers. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" When something is at risk or in danger or about to be lost, those are the moments you start to realize how much it means to you. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we're doing publicly, 'like'-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" I'm not confident in my own ability to resist the titanic force of my own ego. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" In college, I was a huge fan of 'Les Miserables.' I seem to remember that people who were into French literature preferred Hugo's poetry. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" I think there is a real thing going on where writers are feeling more liberated to write with a big canvas because of a demonstrable, continued appetite for long-form storytelling. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" Reading was not just an escape or a Band-Aid; it was a deep form of feeling seen and recognized, and being able to see and recognize other kindred spirits. My dad was a writer, too, which also likely had something to do with that. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" I find it heartening that readers are still excited about diving into a world. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" I have this weird tropism for islands. Take me to an island as far from New York as I can possibly go. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer 'How should novels be?' but 'Why write novels at all?' "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" When I get online, there's this cycle of anxiety and narcissism that takes over, which is the part of me that I like the least. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" I came to feel that, in addition to Imre Kertesz, Hungary has produced at least three contemporary novelists who deserve the Nobel: Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy and Laszlo Krasznahorkai. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" Narnia, Middle-earth and New York were my three fantasy universes when I was a kid. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" Sure, 'Les Miserables' can be melodramatic. And seeing the musical instead of reading the novel will save you some time and spare you the long part where Hugo goes on and on about the Parisian sewer system. But I would hate for the novel to lose that. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" If I could do what Hilary Mantel does, I would probably do that. She is more intelligent and a better researcher and knows more what she's about than I do. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" I don't quite know why, but I am long-winded. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" I grew up in a university town in eastern North Carolina - what's called Tobacco Road. It was very rural. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" I was working my first adult job, a quasi journalistic job, writing content for a website. In the offices, we had banks of TVs, papers, a constant media stream, which was unusual for 2001. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" Any character that can't be kept straight, to me, isn't a character who should be in the book - you know, anyone not vivid enough to have a claim on my attention. "

Garth Risk Hallberg