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

Chad Harbach

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Chad Harbach
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Racine
Wisconsin
Chad Daniel Harbach
Somehow
Novel
Achieve
Else
Directness
Anywhere

More quotes by 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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For many years I didn't have health insurance.
Chad Harbach
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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.
Chad Harbach
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In fact, theres a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.
Chad Harbach
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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.
Chad Harbach
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Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.
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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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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Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.
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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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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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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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
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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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To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.
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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You are skilled. I exhort you.
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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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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There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
Chad Harbach