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To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.
Chad Harbach
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Chad Harbach
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Racine
Wisconsin
Chad Daniel Harbach
Seemed
Parents
Parent
Idea
Best
Ideas
Writing
Precarious
More quotes by Chad Harbach
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
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
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
Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.
Chad Harbach
You are skilled. I exhort you.
Chad Harbach
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
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
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
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
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
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
Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do.
Chad Harbach
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
Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.
Chad Harbach
There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
Chad Harbach
The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.
Chad Harbach
Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
Chad Harbach
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
Baseball is a team game but, at the same time, it's a very lonely game: unlike in soccer or basketball, where players roam around, in baseball everyone has their little plot of the field to tend. When the action comes to you, the spotlight is on you but no one can help you.
Chad Harbach
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
