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" 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. "

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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

Know

Film

" At 14 and 15, I was sort of my town's resident beatnik. "

" 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

Over

Narcissism

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I happen to be the kind of reader who, if I like something, I don't want it to end. "

" 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

Island

Weird

" 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

Trying

Doing

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

" 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

New

Started

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

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

" 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. "

" 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?' "

" 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

Nature

Passionate

" 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. "

" For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on. "

" I associated excellence in writing with New York City. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I fell in love with New York at some indeterminate point in my early years. "

" 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. "

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

" Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment. "

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

Garth Risk Hallberg

Why

I Am

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Garth Risk Hallberg

University

Road