Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes

I'm trying to do what Frank O'Hara did and remind myself there there's a lot of good stuff. I write about New York for my own mental health.

When I first came to New York, I was so bored. My friends were like, 'Do a blog. It's the hip thing to do for male models.'

Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.

I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought... I thought... maybe, one day, I could be one of them.

You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

I wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl - long before I was a musician and a songwriter.

What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'

I seem to only write New York stories because it's the only thing that inspires or interests me.

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.

Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions).

I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.

It is hard not to be inspired when you're living in New York. It doesn't matter what you do. I think that there is so much going on in this city. I like walking around or taking the subway, thinking about all the history here, looking at the architecture and all the people; of course, the museums. It's tough to find a better place to live.

I love New York ... I think it's the best city in the world. As far as cities go, everything's there. I think it's so vibrant. I love the people, I think they're honest, in your face. If they don't like you, they'll say, 'Get out of my way,' if they like you they'll slap you on the back and support you. It's a very intoxicating environment to be in.

Today coming to work, I saw one of those only in New York scenes. It was a rat who had passed out after choking on a pretzel.

New York is a city of conversations overheard, of people at the next restaurant table (micrometers away) checking your watch, of people reading the stories in your newspaper on the subway train.

If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, call New York. Cosmopolitan they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. "Little old New York's good enough for us"--that's what they sing.

Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in the air which made one think - made me think for many years - that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it.

Old New York City is a friendly old town From Washington Heights to Harlem on down There's a-mighty many people all millin' all around They'll kick you when you're up and knock you when you're down It's hard times in the city Livin' down in New York town

In New York City, a lot of people think "the great outdoors" is the area between your front door and a taxi cab.

I love New York City. I love that I get to live there and I love everything about it.

I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.

It was Night. In most places, Night is a time for sleep, for calm, and for mystery. But not in New York City, where many things conspired every evening to murder the night.

New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from.