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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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Chad Harbach
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Racine
Wisconsin
Chad Daniel Harbach
Influence
Huge
Another
Hard
Chekhov
Older
Writer

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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.
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Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
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To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
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Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
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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.
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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.
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In fact, theres a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.
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