Garth Risk Hallberg Quote

I'm trying to focus on my job as I see it, which is to write the next thing and to remain, to th...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

If I could do what Hilary Mantel does, I would probably do that. She is more intelligent and a bette...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

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

It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I have this weird tropism for islands. Take me to an island as far from New York as I can possibly g...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I think several generations of my family had novels in the drawer. You know the montage in 'The ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Any character that can't be kept straight, to me, isn't a character who should be in the boo...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I fell in love with New York at some indeterminate point in my early years.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I associated excellence in writing with New York City.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I came to feel that, in addition to Imre Kertesz, Hungary has produced at least three contemporary n...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on i...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

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

When I get online, there's this cycle of anxiety and narcissism that takes over, which is the pa...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I remember reading 'The Hobbit' on a car trip from Ohio to Mississippi and getting out at a ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I had one week in the fall of 1996 where I was like, 'I'm America's greatest living teen...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I grew up in a university town in eastern North Carolina - what's called Tobacco Road. It was ve...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Sure, 'Les Miserables' can be melodramatic. And seeing the musical instead of reading the no...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

When something is at risk or in danger or about to be lost, those are the moments you start to reali...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Reading was not just an escape or a Band-Aid; it was a deep form of feeling seen and recognized, and...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

One of the ways I stuck out was I was a very passionate reader. There was probably a cyclical nature...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I was working my first adult job, a quasi journalistic job, writing content for a website. In the of...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I'm not confident in my own ability to resist the titanic force of my own ego.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

You don't have to subject yourself to the sweep and rigor of Bourdieu's book 'Distinctio...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

It's like we've been living in two different cities. You up here in all this marbled comfort, and me...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he s...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doo...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

He lights a cigarette off a candle. These death-tubes, these little crutches or fuses: useful for ge...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

A fragmented film such as 'Babel' gives the impression of 'edginess' but, in its for...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

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

For a moment, he thought he sensed, beneath the visible world, some blind infrastructure connecting ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

A vision of underground connections flashed before him again, only inverted. A towering construction...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

All these threads, like the ley-lines he'd read about in his Time-Life history books, converging on ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

The four food groups of bachelorhood: Frozen, Cold Cuts, Breakfast Cereal, and Takeout.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we're d...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I respect Billy Joel, but I'm not a guy who's gonna sit down and listen to the entire 'E...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

In college, I was a huge fan of 'Les Miserables.' I seem to remember that people who were in...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

And as he reached for William's leg, the way a small child will reach for its mother's, there welled...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Keith was no Franciscan, and it seemed to him an act of narcissism to feed pigeons, who would if any...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to othe...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

In the wasteland of metro Boston, at thirteen, fourteen, his big dream had been of a gun to his own ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Punk had picked the locks, sluiced out into the grid.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I didn't drink, I told him, with that embarrassed feeling I got whenever I was reminded that I had a...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

What people did with their genitals was their business.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

When she awakened in the a.m. into blind-slit shrinking nowhereness, it had all gone disorientingly ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Do you understand how rare it is to get a real chance to save someone?
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Actual artists are like mythological creatures,' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

But no, what interested him, psychologically speaking, was the sense of continuity itself, the mind'...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Three’s all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Some young man has wronged you, hasn't he?' From a person who renounced on principle the possibility...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Charlie tried to focus on what she was saying, but his head felt packed with gauze. Like no one coul...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Sitting in an armchair under yellow lamplight in front of a black window in an apartment whose only ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Then she spotted in the corner, glowing wonderfully, a Wurlitzer jukebox. ' Holy shit!' It was like ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Even the beauty of the landscape was an abstraction, like the beauty of a man in an advertisement fo...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful differen...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

A funny thing happened post-diagnosis. They put him on drugs, things went up and down, but he lived....
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Detonations crash in from nearby like walls she's a void at the center of.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Maybe the siren was was a fire truck? Mercer couldn't see one anywhere, but like some bounding St. B...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

He's moving with such purpose that William is scared he might just speed right off the rooftop, like...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

The universe of his own feelings keeps crowding everyone else's out. It is a constant struggle to se...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

You remember that saying, 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life?' There's something awful...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

What would Walt Whitman do?
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

But every impulse becomes unbearable sooner or later.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

So he'll keep dragging himself up this bridge between possible worlds, this rickety ruin of light, t...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Darkness just loosens the mask. Sharpens the mind's eye. Makes the color of a remembered pencil, or ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

But porca miseria, the things night can do to time. In place of hardwired sequence, it's more...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Daddy just repeated the word, internship. As an alibi, it was a thing of beauty: its overtone...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

William loathed his family,' Mercer said. 'With cause.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

How to break this to him. How to let a thing be broken.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Her eyes were glistening, but for some reason he couldn't reach out and touch her. It was like some ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

You assumed whatever was vivid to yourself was vivid to others, and vice versa, but she was going to...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

The absence of a skyline makes him doubt he'll ever get where he's going, and behind him, where he's...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

You're hung up on something that's never going to love you back.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

IN NEW YORK, you can get anything delivered. Such, anyway, is the principle I’m operating on.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Who didn’t exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories?
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

watch William’s beloved sport, but to him televised football was no more interesting, or even narr...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Steering between the Scylla of too much and the Charybdis of not-enough, he’d worked hard to proje...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imagina...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

It seemed impossible that he’d chosen to live here, at a latitude where spring was a semantic vari...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

All the same,” replied Syme patiently, “just at present you only see the tree by the light of th...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

THE THING WAS, William had a kind of genius for not noticing what he didn’t want to notice.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

On one hand, you couldn’t count on anything; on the other, on any given day, change was vanishingl...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

No amount of art, even of the Great American variety, can elevate you above, or insulate you from, t...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Choice isn’t the same thing as freedom—not when someone else is framing the choices for you.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

When you were young, you had the resources to rebuild after each crater fate blasted in your life. B...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Love, as Mercer had heretofore understood it, involved huge gravitational fields of duty and disappr...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Aren’t you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn’t still dream of a world other than thi...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

There was nothing New York liked reading about more than itself.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Great rolls of toilet paper arc like ejaculate through the black sycamores.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

No past and no future. Save for the fireworker himself, no one ever knows the grand finale is the gr...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

The Lonliest Man in the World, she said, only has room in his heart for one person, and if he can't ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

What he wanted above all to get right was the web of relationships a dozen column inches had never b...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

But I guess what I would want to leave each of you with finally -- tender some Evidence of, against ...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I don't think you can really change anything unless you're willing to say yes.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

You couldn’t trust people to be tomorrow what they had been yesterday.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

this is what happens to people when they spend their entire life inside books + never come out: real...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

And she learned that you couldn’t stockpile anything that mattered, really. Feelings, people, song...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

Sometimes you weren’t yet the person you needed to be to do the work you needed to do.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

I couldn't understand; cheating was the one thing I'd told her all those years ago would be unforgiv...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

And people in love are not to be trusted.
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become un...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG

When I went to Moscow, I felt I was relearning Swan Lake - which was written for the Bolshoi - and b...
DAVID HALLBERG

I'm not one who goes to a lot of fashion shows or tries to infiltrate that world, really.
DAVID HALLBERG

I walk like a duck: very straight up and down. Or like a penguin. It's a dead giveaway that I...
DAVID HALLBERG

It's a thrill for me and for the players. It might not be the NCAA Tournament and it might not have ...
BOB HALLBERG

We certainly want to go out there and show we can play, but an important part of this time of year i...
BOB HALLBERG

She's really been wonderful for us, and she's made such a big difference coming off the bench. It's ...
BOB HALLBERG

If I can relay anything, it's that if someone has a dream, and it isn't the norm of what oth...
DAVID HALLBERG

Every company has its own texture, vocabulary, and singular place in dance history, and I have alway...
DAVID HALLBERG

Many dancers are content with the repertoire they're given. Others are dissatisfied but don'...
DAVID HALLBERG

To be honest, my partner Natasha is my inspiration. She is who I reference when searching for my rol...
DAVID HALLBERG

Because of the way I'm built, I constantly have to strengthen. This is sort of a ritual: I put o...
DAVID HALLBERG

Certainly, when you train as a classical dancer, you are very much influenced by 'Giselle.' ...
DAVID HALLBERG

I have one coach and one coach only. His name is Alexander Vetrov. They brought him in for me when I...
DAVID HALLBERG

I've always questioned the way dancers, myself included, must do the same role year in and year ...
DAVID HALLBERG

Russians are very discerning about ballet. They're very opinionated about what classical ballet ...
DAVID HALLBERG

The Bolshoi style is bigger and more emotional, in a way that I love. It has the freshness and inten...
DAVID HALLBERG

I stopped acting Romeo and just became Romeo.
DAVID HALLBERG

Bejart is almost never performed in New York City; critically, he just gets attacked here.
DAVID HALLBERG

Ballet is certainly appreciated in New York, but it has been a part of the Russian culture, history ...
DAVID HALLBERG

I've been interested in art and fashion for as long as I can remember because they are so visual...
DAVID HALLBERG

I love the dancers in the Bolshoi, but all of my Moscow friends are outside the company. A friend in...
DAVID HALLBERG

I sew my own shoes. Other male dancers don't, but I like it one way, and I've learned to do ...
DAVID HALLBERG

New York at times runs me dry because there's so much to do. There's never enough time to do...
DAVID HALLBERG

I will never stop questioning. I will never stop wanting more and discovering other things and wanti...
DAVID HALLBERG

Ballet is incestuous. This world is smaller than small.
DAVID HALLBERG

Having done so many versions, I never felt like an artist in 'Swan Lake.'
DAVID HALLBERG

When stress sets in, and pressure, I focus.
DAVID HALLBERG

I can take the steel guitars and fiddles off, we can make it a little more pop, cover ideas that are...
GARTH BROOKS

I know in this time of great technological advancement, the idea of reading a book seems almost anac...
GARTH STEIN

Our dog, Comet, is a Lab/poodle mix. She's goofy and silly and sweet.
GARTH STEIN

I'm a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and ...
GARTH STEIN

The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read bo...
GARTH STEIN

Anyone who has a dog knows that they have some very deep thoughts, that they have moods and emotions...
GARTH STEIN

I gotta be honest with you... I hate numbers. I hate chapter numbers. I hate them.
GARTH STEIN

In documentary films, you're a storyteller using found objects. You still have to have a story a...
GARTH STEIN

All athletes speak about the mental element of athletics, and it usually boils down to the same thin...
GARTH STEIN

If only one in 1,000 people that I talk to goes on to write a good book, that's one more good bo...
GARTH NIX

With the 'Old Kingdom' trilogy, at least half the readers were older adults rather than youn...
GARTH NIX

I like movies in particular, on video or T.V. I have lots of old favorites, like Danny Kaye in '...
GARTH NIX

Unlike the stereotypical author, I've never had a job as a short-order cook, but I love cooking ...
GARTH NIX

I studied writing at university, and I actually majored in screenwriting. Then I went to work as a b...
GARTH NIX

I loved publishing; I loved working in the book industry, but I've been writing pretty much nons...
GARTH NIX

In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I ...
GARTH NIX

There is a very big difference between writing for children and writing for young adults. The first ...
GARTH NIX

Writing for children, you do bear a responsibility to not include overt or graphic adult content tha...
GARTH NIX

I grew up in a house full of books and parents who read, which led to me to reading from a very youn...
GARTH NIX

In all my books, I try to have a strong element of realism underlying the fantastic.
GARTH NIX

I find the presence of the sea quite inspiring, and sometimes I do just get out and walk around and ...
GARTH NIX

I tend to think of stories and books as being for everyone, just with an 'entry reading age'...
GARTH NIX

Unfortunately or fortunately, in order to become acquainted with the idiom of country or rock music,...
GARTH HUDSON

I've seen a fair bit of the States and the rest of the world, and I'm convinced that there&#...
GARTH ENNIS

As the scripts come in they are sent to the artists, and the artists are either very busy, or ready ...
GARTH ENNIS

I don't necessarily write everything as automatically assuming it will be collected, there's...
GARTH ENNIS

I guess you can stay sort of true to the story; you don't have to artificially bring the charact...
GARTH ENNIS

I suppose that Heartland, Unknown Soldier and Pride and Joy represent not a quieter side but more of...
GARTH ENNIS

I'm sure you're aware, with the time it takes to put these books together, everything can su...
GARTH ENNIS

If you look at Marvel Comics, there are very few Marvel characters I would like to write.
GARTH ENNIS

It would have shown people that I was prepared to do that kind of work, although I find myself in a ...
GARTH ENNIS

Most regular superhero books are designed to go on forever; of course, very few of them do, but the ...
GARTH ENNIS

There's immense fun to be had as long as you can sort of sneak it past DC. I have been told on o...
GARTH ENNIS

Wouldn't want to write the X-Men, and I suppose the X-Men is the ultimate Marvel comic, and I re...
GARTH ENNIS

Yeah, Hitman I suppose is most of the time a lighter read than Preacher; it was always going to be.
GARTH ENNIS

With a mini series you can give the story a proper sense of pacing, a proper sense of closure.
GARTH ENNIS

I tend to forget what I'm doing will ever be read while I'm writing it, and just get on with...
GARTH ENNIS

The comics I read as a kid were much more influenced by TV and movies. Encountering superheroes as a...
GARTH ENNIS

Hitman does well and it certainly does well enough to survive, but at the same time I don't want...
GARTH ENNIS

It's nice to be in a situation where the two books that I write for a sort of regular monthly in...
GARTH ENNIS

Preacher is a book that somehow allows me time by its settling on it's characters, that sort of ...
GARTH ENNIS

You know, I think I did originally have some sort of idea of maybe a Where Eagles Dare kind of missi...
GARTH ENNIS

I can't really put it in one sentence because although on one hand Preacher is about faith and y...
GARTH ENNIS

I loved 'Monsoon Wedding' and 'Lunchbox' because they had 'real' stories. I ...
GARTH DAVIS

I like to be involved with the scriptwriter early on, helping shape the story, and working out how t...
GARTH DAVIS

Most of the available Indian films in Australia are Bollywood. I did not watch them. In my early day...
GARTH DAVIS

There's no doubt that 'Lion' is an audience pleaser. I mean, I went to a lot of research...
GARTH DAVIS

Audiences are smart, and they don't need to be spoon-fed everything.
GARTH DAVIS

I've always just focused on the work, and I've just tried to be honest with the work. If the...
GARTH DAVIS

I love going to the cinema and thinking you're seeing something, and you end up on a whole other...
GARTH DAVIS

The way I work is I like to immerse myself in the world of the film and in the character's lives...
GARTH DAVIS

I definitely storyboard, but I only start once I have cast and location. I like to find the world fi...
GARTH DAVIS

Filmmaking is not a job but a social responsibility for me.
GARTH DAVIS

I'm just trying to approach what I make with as much respect and research as I can, and just mak...
GARTH DAVIS

Sometimes I thank God... for cheeseburgers.
GARTH BROOKS

Because of the changes in the Padres team I played with last year, I felt like a veteran recently wh...
GARTH BROOKS

I'm much too young to feel this damn old.
GARTH BROOKS

I'd much rather have the honesty than not. Because if you will say what's on your mind and g...
GARTH BROOKS

It's the sweetest thing to be a parent of a daughter. When they hit their twenties, they become ...
GARTH BROOKS

People aren't always themselves. They're always holding back something.
GARTH BROOKS

You can't succeed if you don't know what losing is.
GARTH BROOKS

I spend all my time right now trying to combat music retail and copyright.
GARTH BROOKS

The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.

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Garth Risk Hallberg

The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.

Garth Risk Hallberg

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