Garth Risk Hallberg

“We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we're doing publicly, 'like'-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd.”

“I don't quite know why, but I am long-winded.”

“And as he reached for William's leg, the way a small child will reach for its mother's, there welled up through a small hole in the bottom of Mercer's soul a relief surpassing any he'd ever known in waking life.”

“Failure is so much more interesting.”

“Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.”

“I have this weird tropism for islands. Take me to an island as far from New York as I can possibly go.”

“For paranoia was Zig's late style: How else but through networks and conspiracies could he fashion a target big enough for his outrage? Richard usually found paranoia uninteresting, insofar as it swept away the incidental, which was the real grist of history.”

“As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.”

“I'm not confident in my own ability to resist the titanic force of my own ego.”

“Three’s all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.”

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

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

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

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

“One day, he and William had been speeding toward each other; the next, careening away. But why?”

“And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?”

“I couldn't understand; cheating was the one thing I'd told her all those years ago would be unforgivable. She knew, she said, but that was part of what had been confusing her, that I would even have told her that, as if she weren't an actual human being with the freedom to act, but some character in a scenario in my head. There was a quality I had of making the people closest to me feel lonely, somehow. Some essential cold withholding at the core of myself.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”