209 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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.

I happen to be the kind of reader who, if I like something, I don't want it to end.

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

I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities.

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.

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?'