Chad Harbach Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Chad Harbach

  Notebook, Running, Block

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• 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

  Girl, School, Striving To Be The Best

  "Fielding Questions on The Art of Fielding". Interview with Joshua Lars Weill, www.gq.com. September 2, 2011.

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• Tall people have a real advantage in the world.

  Chad Harbach

  Real, People, World

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• 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

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• Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

  Chad Harbach

  Achieve, Novel

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• Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

  Chad Harbach

  Different, Fiction, Process

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• It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand.

  Chad Harbach

  Chad Harbach (2011). “The Art of Fielding: A Novel”, p.91, Hachette UK

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• 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

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• You are skilled. I exhort you.

  Chad Harbach

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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