GARTH RISK HALLBERG

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.

A fragmented film such as 'Babel' gives the impression of 'edginess' but, in its form, tells us nothing we didn't already know.

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

For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on.

I associated excellence in writing with New York City.

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

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

I find it heartening that readers are still excited about diving into a world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

In college, I was a huge fan of 'Les Miserables.' I seem to remember that people who were into French literature preferred Hugo's poetry.

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

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

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?'

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.

When I get online, there's this cycle of anxiety and narcissism that takes over, which is the part of me that I like the least.

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.

Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment.