Chad Harbach Quotes
-
Poetry might be more about the eternal verities, the essence of the human soul, and - although it's reductive to say so - fiction has perhaps been more about the differences between the unconstrained world of the imagination and the realities you run into, day-to-day, when you're riding your donkey.
→ -
There are no whys in a person's life, and very few hows. In the end, in search of useful wisdom, you could only come back to the most hackneyed concepts, like kindness, forbearance, infinite patience. Solomon and Lincoln: This too shall pass. Damn right it will. Or Chekhov: Nothing passes. Equally true.
→ -
Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do.
→ -
Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
→ -
But baseball was different... You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you f****d up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error, but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see? ... You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard. And trying hard, as everyone told him, was wrong, all wrong.
→ -
He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story.
→ -
I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer.
→ -
I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go.
→ -
Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.
→ -
Getting your foot in the door with some publishing people can be important when you're starting out as a writer, but it's also not enough to get you where you need to be.
→ -
My favorite sports novel is End Zone by Delillo. It's such a great looking book too, the black cover with the football player on it. It's just a fantastic little book.
→ -
You don't have to even see the common man anymore if you don't want to! Only through the telescope on your yacht.
→ -
The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.
→ -
Looking at and shaping your own work is a very intuitive process. You see something you've written in your notebook. It's there on the page and either feels right or it doesn't, and it's hard sometimes to go beyond that and discover why it feels that way.
→ -
A lot of my close friends had tolerantly washed their hands of the whole idea of me writing a book. They had said to themselves, "I don't know what he's doing."
→ -
I tended to write the book in these bursts of two or three months at a time. So I would know, or at least feel securely, that for the next few months I was at least going to have a few hours a day.
→ -
There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.
→ -
The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.
→ -
People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
→ -
Heat radiated off Henry's face. Salty snot ran down his upper lip. A majestic fart propelled him to the top of Section 12, just at the springing of the stadium's curve. He slapped the sign as if high-fiving a teammate. It gave back a game shudder. He was crusing now, darkness be damned, stripping off his sweatshirt and his long underwear top without breaking stride.
→ -
Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.
→ -
For me, the process always has to be pretty intense. I could never write just two or three days a week. It had to be every day.
→ -
I do think that sports is really rich dramatically that, and this is kind of a self-serving thing to say, but I wonder why there aren't more, better sports novels.
→ -
The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.
→ -
It was strange the way he loved her; a side long and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention.
→ -
The idea of the writer who writes nineteen novels, with various ups and downs and levels of experimentation, isn't around so much now. There's a focus, I think, on fewer books, with more pressure on each book to succeed. With that there comes, I think, a certain pressure towards shapeliness in fiction. Towards neatness. And I think writers feel that, and it can effect how they write.
→ -
It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand.
→ -
Baseball is a team game but, at the same time, it's a very lonely game: unlike in soccer or basketball, where players roam around, in baseball everyone has their little plot of the field to tend. When the action comes to you, the spotlight is on you but no one can help you.
→ -
Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, sometimes even surprising myself.
→ -
I think the MFA programs have had a real effect on the state of American fiction, but I don't think it's a question of "this is written by someone with an MFA, and this isn't." I challenge anyone to identify a book in that way. It's totally impossible.
→
Related Authors
-
Kevin Powers Writer -
Matthew Thomas Author -
Jennifer Egan Novelist -
Evan Mandery Author -
Justin Torres Novelist -
Elif Batuman Author -
Amy Waldman Author -
Keith Gessen Novelist -
Olen Steinhauer Writer -
Jonathan Franzen Novelist -
Erin Morgenstern Writer -
Karen Russell Novelist -
Chris Bohjalian Novelist -
Bonnie Jo Campbell Novelist -
Bryce Courtenay Novelist -
Ann Patchett Author -
-
Jeffrey Eugenides Novelist -
Tea Obreht Novelist -
Bruce Sterling Author