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" I'm not confident in my own ability to resist the titanic force of my own ego. "
Garth Risk Hallberg
Confident
Own
Ability
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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
More
New
Started
" 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
Like
Over
Narcissism
" I don't quite know why, but I am long-winded. "
Garth Risk Hallberg
Why
I Am
Am
" I had one week in the fall of 1996 where I was like, 'I'm America's greatest living teenage poet.' "
Garth Risk Hallberg
Living
Fall
America
" 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
Drive
New York
Age
" 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
You
Book
Kind
" 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
Reading
You
Long
" At 14 and 15, I was sort of my town's resident beatnik. "
Garth Risk Hallberg
Resident
Beatnik
Town
" I fell in love with New York at some indeterminate point in my early years. "
Garth Risk Hallberg
New York
Years
Point
" Narnia, Middle-earth and New York were my three fantasy universes when I was a kid. "
Garth Risk Hallberg
Kid
Fantasy
Were
" 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
Up
" 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
Literature
Bug
Things
" For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on. "
Garth Risk Hallberg
Get
Reason
Reading
" 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. "
Garth Risk Hallberg
Internet
Small
Evening
" 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
Like
Trying
Doing
" I find it heartening that readers are still excited about diving into a world. "
Garth Risk Hallberg
Excited
About
Find
" I associated excellence in writing with New York City. "
Garth Risk Hallberg
New York
City
Excellence
" 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
See
Reading
Feeling
" I had this dream that I was going to come to New York and be a writer. "
Garth Risk Hallberg
Dream
Writer
New York
" 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
College
Fan
People
" 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
Us
" 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
Job
Website
Writing
" 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
Respect
Guy
Gonna
" 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
iPad
Question
Driving
" 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
Me
" I happen to be the kind of reader who, if I like something, I don't want it to end. "
Garth Risk Hallberg
Kind
Something
Want
" 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
Me
Weird
" 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
Enough
Book
Character
" In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week. "
Garth Risk Hallberg
Student
Week
Read
" 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. "
Garth Risk Hallberg
Feeling
Remember
Trip