Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes
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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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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'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.
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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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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 fell in love with New York at some indeterminate point in my early years.
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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 find it heartening that readers are still excited about diving into a world.
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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 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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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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I happen to be the kind of reader who, if I like something, I don't want it to end.
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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.
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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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Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment.
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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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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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I'm not confident in my own ability to resist the titanic force of my own ego.
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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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At 14 and 15, I was sort of my town's resident beatnik.
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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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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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I associated excellence in writing with New York City.
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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.