Quotes from 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.

I associated excellence in writing with New York City.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.