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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. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

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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

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

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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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" 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. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

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

Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

Garth Risk Hallberg

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

Garth Risk Hallberg

" 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

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

Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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. "

Garth Risk Hallberg

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

Garth Risk Hallberg

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

Garth Risk Hallberg

" 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

" 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

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

Garth Risk Hallberg

" 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

" 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

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

Garth Risk Hallberg