209 Quotes by 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.