Top 96 Chad Harbach Quotes
#1. 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.
Chad Harbach
#2. Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
Chad Harbach
#3. Before long four dozen balls lay scattered at the base of the fence, a harvest of dirty white fruit.
Chad Harbach
#4. To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.
Chad Harbach
#5. When I write for 'n+1,' I begin by doing a lot of reading, to try to convince myself I'm not stupid. Then I scribble down a paragraph here, a paragraph there, when a notion strikes. Then I see if I can arrange those notions in a way that yields an argument.
Chad Harbach
#6. A moment would come, and then another, and then another. These moments would be his life.
Chad Harbach
#7. 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.
Chad Harbach
#8. Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.
Chad Harbach
#9. 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.
Chad Harbach
#10. here. Here he was bound to seem absurd. He
Chad Harbach
#11. I've earned my living in all sorts of terrible ways - as a janitor, a copy editor, a psychotherapist.
Chad Harbach
#12. The only life worth living was the unfree life ... the life in which you were chained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect.
Chad Harbach
#13. Henry," he said. "You are skilled. I exhort you.
Chad Harbach
#14. It's quite a feeling to finish something you have been 10 years beholden to and to have a clean slate.
Chad Harbach
#15. There were 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 self patience.
Chad Harbach
#16. 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.
Chad Harbach
#17. That little school in the crook of the baseball glove that is Wisconsin. He'd
Chad Harbach
#18. And as the end arrived and his breath left him he couldn't remember or imagine ever having cared.
Chad Harbach
#20. You know, it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.
Chad Harbach
#21. It dawned on him - as it hadn't before; he was dense, he was slow - that his parents were five hundred miles away. They could make him come home, they could refuse to pay the portion of his tuition they'd agreed to pay, but they couldn't see his jeans. "Understood," he said.
Chad Harbach
#22. People loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering.
Chad Harbach
#23. Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.
Chad Harbach
#24. I play American football every Saturday, which I find calming.
Chad Harbach
#25. It is no fun at all to have been writing a book for seven or so years, especially when you've never published anything before.
Chad Harbach
#26. 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.
Chad Harbach
#27. April. Henry passed the word into sounds so small their sense disappeared, as if he'd wandered into the wide spaces that separate the solid parts of the molecule.
Chad Harbach
#28. I think people have the wrong idea of 'Moby Dick' as this somber, boring thing.
Chad Harbach
#29. There's certainly a large literature around baseball in the U.S.
Chad Harbach
#30. He paused in his gyrations to give Schwartz a high five. "I'm wearing my cap askew," [Owen] said.
Chad Harbach
#31. 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.
Chad Harbach
#32. It's very hard right now to be a pro sports fan. The economics of this stuff is abysmal.
Chad Harbach
#33. I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
Chad Harbach
#34. AVERT DISASTER, in fact, would have been a perfect school motto - the purpose of the place, as far as Schwartz could tell, was to keep three thousand would-be maniacs sedated by boredom until a succession of birthdays transformed them into adults.
Chad Harbach
#35. Tall people have a real advantage in the world.
Chad Harbach
#36. he took her sweatshirt and hung it on a wooden
Chad Harbach
#37. The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.
Chad Harbach
#38. 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.
Chad Harbach
#39. He felt a touch of sadness now that it had happened, now that he knew what it was like. Not because it wasn't enjoyable, or wouldn't be repeated, but because one more of life's mysteries had been revealed.
Chad Harbach
#40. 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.
Chad Harbach
#41. Everyone expected him to succeed, no matter what the arena, and so failure, even temporary failure, had ceased to be an option.
Chad Harbach
#42. There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
Chad Harbach
#43. Only here, long after midnight, while everyone else was sleeping, when nothing was expected of him, could Schwartz convince himself that he was working hard enough. These hours felt stolen, added to his life. The voice fell quiet.
Chad Harbach
#44. 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.
Chad Harbach
#45. 3. There are three stages. Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
33. Do not confuse the first and third stages. Thoughtless being is attained by everyone, the return to thoughtless being by a very few.
Chad Harbach
#46. A soul isn't something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love.
Chad Harbach
#47. For many years I didn't have health insurance.
Chad Harbach
#48. In fact, there's a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.
Chad Harbach
#49. Literature could turn you into an asshole: he'd learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.
Chad Harbach
#50. There's so much standing around,' Owen said when Henry asked him what he liked about the game. 'And pockets in the uniforms.
Chad Harbach
#51. Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.
Chad Harbach
#52. But people didn't forgive you for doing what felt right-that was the last thing they forgave you for.
Chad Harbach
#53. In his life he'd passed through long periods of gratefulness and good cheer, but he'd scarcely even imagined this level of thorough contentment with things as they were. His chronic restlessness had fled. He wanted nothing new. He wanted only to hang on to what he had. It was almost excruciating.
Chad Harbach
#54. Pella felt relieved to sit across from someone who was willing to act so unreservedly glum in her presence, as if she weren't there. David never did that
David's eyes were always right on her, probing, admiring, assessing, enjoying. That was what he called love.
Chad Harbach
#55. Just for the sake of my own stupid pleasure
Chad Harbach
#56. 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.
Chad Harbach
#57. Layers like a bad Van Gogh. Pella felt little beads
Chad Harbach
#58. He wished that college required you to use your body more, forced you to remember that life was lived in four dimensions.
Chad Harbach
#59. 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.
Chad Harbach
#60. 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.
Chad Harbach
#61. Life was long, unless you died, and he didn't intend to spend the next sixty years talking about the last twenty-two.
Chad Harbach
#62. I was a ballplayer, but only for a limited time. I grew up playing in Wisconsin. It's a very sports-centric part of the country that I grew up in and I played a lot of sports, but baseball first and foremost. I played through high school. I was a middle-infielder.
Chad Harbach
#63. 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.
Chad Harbach
#64. The problem, like most problems in life, probably had to do with his footwork.
Chad Harbach
#65. 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. But there's just that few days of frustration to get to that point.
Chad Harbach
#66. So much of one's life was spent reading; it made sense not to do it alone.
Chad Harbach
#67. People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
Chad Harbach
#68. Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do.
Chad Harbach
#69. You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.
Chad Harbach
#70. When a philosopher wants high ceilings, he goes outside'. He doesn't buy an oversize house that requires massive amounts of dwindling resources to heat in the winter
Chad Harbach
#71. Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
Chad Harbach
#72. It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand.
Chad Harbach
#73. 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."
Chad Harbach
#74. 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.
Chad Harbach
#75. Had he learned - would he ever learn - to discard the thoughts he could not use?
Chad Harbach
#76. A lot of writers choose to live in New York, partly because of the literary culture here, and partly because Brooklyn's a pretty nice place to live. And a lot of writers who might not geographically reside in New York still point their ambitions towards New York in some sense.
Chad Harbach
#77. Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.
Chad Harbach
#78. Neither had said so, but she could tell. Unless she was just paranoid, living in her head again, but you always lived in your head and you had to go with what you felt.
Chad Harbach
#80. The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.
Chad Harbach
#81. American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it.
Chad Harbach
#82. By absorbing so many books he was trying to purge his own failure as a writer. It wasn't working, but he feared what would happen if he stopped.
Chad Harbach
#83. 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
Chad Harbach
#84. Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.
Chad Harbach
#85. To reach a ball he has never reached before, to extend himself to the very limits of his range, and then a step farther, this is the shortstop's dream.
Chad Harbach
#86. Pella felt like she knew a lot about men, but she couldn't imagine what it would be like to be one of them, to be in a room of them with no woman present, to participate in their silent rights of contrition and redemption.
Chad Harbach
#88. She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights.
Chad Harbach
#89. I'm just kind of really interested in athletes as artists of a pretty serious variety and people who devote themselves to what they do in a really incredible way.
Chad Harbach
#90. Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he's wrong.
Chad Harbach
#91. You told me once that a soul isn't something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. And you did that with more dedication than most, that work of building a soul-not for your own benefit but for the benefit of those that knew you.
Chad Harbach
#92. You don't have to even see the common man anymore if you don't want to! Only through the telescope on your yacht.
Chad Harbach
#93. these would be worn throughout Coshwale's omnicompetent
Chad Harbach
#94. 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.
Chad Harbach
#95. She's been reading too much, he thought -had drifted across that line that separated what you might find in a book from what you might do
Chad Harbach
#96. Putting Henry at shortstop - it was like taking a painting that had been shoved in a closet and hanging it in the ideal spot. You instantly forgot what the room had looked like before.
Chad Harbach
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