Latest Chad Harbach Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

  Athlete, Artist, People

  Source: www.gq.com

• 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

  Sports, Football, Book

  Source: www.gq.com

• I think that it is very interesting to write about a team because a team is a group of people who work in very close quarters and have very intense relationships so - in my days of playing sports, I was very rarely on a team that did not have it's own peculiar dynamic, and you wind up having very intense feelings for good and for bad about these people with whom you spend many hours a day.

  Chad Harbach

  Sports, Team, Writing

  Source: www.gq.com

• Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.

  Chad Harbach

  Influence, Chekhov, Huge

  Source: www.gq.com

• 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

  Sports, Thinking, Self

  Source: www.gq.com

• 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

  Writing, Two, Three

  Source: www.gq.com

• 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.

  Chad Harbach

  Book, Space, Gears

  Source: www.gq.com

• Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.

  Chad Harbach

  Book, Ideas, Dollars

  Source: www.gq.com

• 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

  Book, Writing, Two

  Source: www.gq.com

• It's very hard right now to be a pro sports fan. The economics of this stuff is abysmal.

  Chad Harbach

  Sports, Fans, Stuff

  Source: www.gq.com

• 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

  Men, Telescopes, Want

  Source: www.gq.com

• 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

  Notebook, Pages, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Chad Harbach

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.

  Chad Harbach

  Jobs, Long, Challenges

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

  Book, Fighting, Years

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

  Fun, Book, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

  Book, Writing, Hands

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

  Doors, Feet, People

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

  New York, Nice, Ambition

  Source: therumpus.net

• If you're part of any kind of writerly community, some of those people will have gone through MFA programs, and their thinking leaks into yours. So whatever changes MFAs have made to the culture, it's to the culture as a whole. It can't be pinned down to individual books in a way that some people would like to do.

  Chad Harbach

  Book, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

• The effects of MFA programs, and the rise of creative writing instruction more generally, are far more diffuse than people think. Even if you're a writer who has avoided institutions your whole life, you're still going to be reading a lot of writers who have MFAs, and are affiliated with universities.

  Chad Harbach

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

  Real, Book, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

  Book, Topics, Strive

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

  Running, Reality, Differences

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

  Art, Trying, Want

  Source: therumpus.net