A biography for Garth Risk Hallberghasn’t been written yet.
“Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you've ever tried to outrun. And then how to know—the present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to the one so acutely alive under the kitchen table—which you, specifically, is the real one?”
“It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.”
“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.”
“William loathed his family,' Mercer said. 'With cause.”
“I respect Billy Joel, but I'm not a guy who's gonna sit down and listen to the entire 'Essential Billy Joel.'”
“I came to feel that, in addition to Imre Kertesz, Hungary has produced at least three contemporary novelists who deserve the Nobel: Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy and Laszlo Krasznahorkai.”
“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.”
“Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling.”
“I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities.”
“Narnia, Middle-earth and New York were my three fantasy universes when I was a kid.”
“That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.”
“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 associated excellence in writing with New York City.”
“It's like we've been living in two different cities. You up here in all this marbled comfort, and me down there, killing myself in slow motion.”
“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.”
“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.”
“It’s a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too.”
“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.”
“Incidental, all of it, of course, but this was what this city bestowed that novels couldn't: not what you needed in order to live, but what made the living worth doing in the first place.”
“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.”