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" 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

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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?' "

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

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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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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" Definitely, something is happening out there in Internet world at any given moment, but the likelihood that it's something that can't wait until that evening for you to find out about it is very small. "

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

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

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" 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 associated excellence in writing with New York City. "

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" 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. "

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

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

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" 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

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

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. "

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

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

Garth Risk Hallberg

" I remember reading 'The Hobbit' on a car trip from Ohio to Mississippi and getting out at a rest-stop in Mississippi and feeling jet-lagged at my return from Middle-earth. "

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

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