Garth Risk Hallberg

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

I had this dream that I was going to come to New York and be a writer. ”

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

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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?' ”

Sure, 'Les Miserables' can be melodramatic. And seeing the musical instead of reading the novel will save you some time and spare you the long part where Hugo goes on and on about the Parisian sewer system. But I would hate for the novel to lose that. ”