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" 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. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

Work

Doubt

Got

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Garth Risk Hallberg

Writing

Ego

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

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

" 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. "

" 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?' "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

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

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

" 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 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