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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. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

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" 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. "

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

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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. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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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. "

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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 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. "

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

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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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" 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. "

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

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

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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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" 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. "

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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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" 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