Chad Harbach Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
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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.
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Tall people have a real advantage in the world.
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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.
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In fact, theres a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.
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Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
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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.
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... people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering.
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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.
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Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
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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.
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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.
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For many years I didn't have health insurance.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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But people didn't forgive you for doing what felt right-that was the last thing they forgave you for.
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To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.