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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.

Chad Harbach

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Chad Harbach
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Racine
Wisconsin
Chad Daniel Harbach
Person
Kindness
Passes
Come
Infinite
Equally
Nothing
Shall
Search
Hackneyed
Right
Wisdom
Damn
Whys
Life
True
Useful
Chekhov
Like
Ends
Patience
Forbearance
Persons
Concepts
Solomon
Back
Pass
Lincoln

More quotes by Chad Harbach

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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
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The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.
Chad Harbach
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Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
Chad Harbach
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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
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You are skilled. I exhort you.
Chad Harbach
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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
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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
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Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do.
Chad Harbach
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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.
Chad Harbach
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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.
Chad Harbach
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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
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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
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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
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For many years I didn't have health insurance.
Chad Harbach
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The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.
Chad Harbach
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There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
Chad Harbach