Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes

I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it, an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

I do not go outdoors... As far as I'm concerned, the whole point of living in New York City is indoors. You want greenery? Order the spinach.

I don't think any other city in the world... the sun doesn't shine the same way anywhere as it does in New York. And then I guess everyone's very good at hanging out. Not in a crazy way, but you're just constantly interacting and learning.

I love, love writing about Los Angeles. I love exploring every part of it. And I find, rather than a burden, it's actually one of the most enjoyable parts of the writing process for me. I love everything about L.A. Okay, not the traffic. But I love the way it looks. I love the geography. I love the diversity.

Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially.

I'm a city boy. I grew up in a big city, in Birmingham, and I want to write about a city. It's much richer tapestry for me than green fields. Fields and wild life make me feel ill. I don't like - I don't want to write about that stuff.

I always found very strong images for my songwriting in New York.

The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.

I grew up in New York City - I grew up surrounded by every sound that you imagine can come from a New Yorker. All of the different boroughs and all of the different sounds.

I wrote a book of essays about New York called 'The Colossus of New York,' but it's not about - you know, when I'm writing about rush hour or Central Park, it's not a black Central Park, it's just Central Park, and it's not a black rush hour, it's just rush hour.

For me, New York is about anonymity; that's the draw. It's not at all about other people in my business being nearby. It's that I can get on the subway and eavesdrop on conversations that I would never have access to otherwise. That's why I stay. That's why I could never leave.

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.

There are many sides of the urban life that I dislike, but there are many sides I am deeply in love with and attached to.

Gray feels like the city.

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

I love cities. New York, Montreal, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, L.A... but, I do choose to live in Vancouver. It's home.

I've lived in London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, New York, and Turin. But New York is my favorite city. It has so much energy, so much toughness.

Everyone's looking to the urban scene for inspiration now.

All my best friends live downtown in New York City. I was made in Soho.

I'm an east coaster, you know, I'm brought up in Toronto where it's very much, like, kind of a miniature New York in that there's a subway and you're surrounded by people a lot and, you know, you bump into people and you have interactions and you communicate and la la la.

One of the things I love about 'Rubicon' is I really recognize the New York City that they're depicting in it, having lived here for 15 years.

You can get the true essence of New Yorkers by just hanging out in Central Park.

I live in New York City, so there's so much stimulation when you walk outside, it does not require a television in the home.

When I came to New York and I opened the window of the thirty-fifth-floor apartment, there's light pollution and fog, and I couldn't see my star. So I drew it on my wrist with a pen, but it kept washing away. Then I went to a tattoo parlor on Second Avenue and had it done.