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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Garth Risk Hallberg Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
