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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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Chad Harbach
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Racine
Wisconsin
Chad Daniel Harbach
Whole
Writers
Universities
Writing
Program
Avoided
Even
Effects
Programs
Going
Writer
Instruction
Think
Creative
Generally
Thinking
Reading
Rise
Life
Stills
University
Affiliated
People
Still
Institutions
Diffuse

More quotes by 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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... 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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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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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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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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In fact, theres a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.
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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Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
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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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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
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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To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.
Chad Harbach