Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Chad Harbach
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Racine
Wisconsin
Chad Daniel Harbach
Fun
Anything
Book
Writing
Years
Never
Published
Seven
Especially

More quotes by Chad Harbach

Image
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
Image
Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
Chad Harbach
Image
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
Image
The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.
Chad Harbach
Image
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
Image
There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
Chad Harbach
Image
You are skilled. I exhort you.
Chad Harbach
Image
In fact, theres a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.
Chad Harbach
Image
To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.
Chad Harbach
Image
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
Image
For many years I didn't have health insurance.
Chad Harbach
Image
Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do.
Chad Harbach
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.
Chad Harbach
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
Chad Harbach
Image
Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.
Chad Harbach