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" 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

Came

Who

Three

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

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

Garth Risk Hallberg

Why

I Am

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I had this dream that I was going to come to New York and be a writer. "

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

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

" 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?' "

" 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. "

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

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

" You don't have to subject yourself to the sweep and rigor of Bourdieu's book 'Distinction' to feel how thoroughly a lower-calorie version of its ideas has been absorbed into the cultural bloodstream. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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

Writing

Ego

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" I think several generations of my family had novels in the drawer. You know the montage in 'The Royal Tenenbaums' where each character has produced some sort of minor work? It was like having a magician in the household. "

" 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

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

" 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

" I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived - you know, where Whitman had walked the streets. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

Thought

New York

" 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. "