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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 -
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.
Garth Risk Hallberg
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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.
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 -
I had one week in the fall of 1996 where I was like, 'I'm America's greatest living teenage poet.'
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 -
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 -
In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week.
Garth Risk Hallberg
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I don't quite know why, but I am long-winded.
Garth Risk Hallberg -
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 -
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 -
Narnia, Middle-earth and New York were my three fantasy universes when I was a kid.
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 -
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
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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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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