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Chad Harbach Biography

Chad Harbach (born 1975) is an American writer. An editor at the journal n + 1, he is the author of the 2011 novel The Art of Fielding.

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Chad Harbach Quotes

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.

Access, Alive, Create, Human Condition, Someday

The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.

Challenge, Challenges, Job, Jobs, Long, Simply

Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.

Influence, Chekhov, Huge, Older, Hard

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.

Kindness, Infinite, Chekhov, Right, Come

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.

Baseball, Basketball, Soccer, Spotlight, Team, Time

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

Achieve, Anywhere, Directness, Novel

There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.

Return, Stage, Thought, Three

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.

Book, Fun, Published, Writing

I think the MFA programs have had a real effect on the state of American fiction, but I don't think it's a question of "this is written by someone with an MFA, and this isn't. " I challenge anyone to identify a book in that way. It's totally impossible.

Book, Effect, Real, State, Thinking

I do think that sports is really rich dramatically that, and this is kind of a self-serving thing to say, but I wonder why there aren't more, better sports novels.

Say, Self, Sports, Thing, Think, Thinking

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. "

Book, Friends, Hands, Said, Writing

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.

15Th, Book, Gears, Space, Start

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.

Reading, Writing, Thinking, Writer, Affiliated

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.

Book, Changes, Community, People, Thinking, Whole

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.

Ask, Guy, Look, Player, Sports, Wish

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.

Although, Essence, Fiction, Reality, Run, Running

There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.

Fun, Nearly, Take, Worry, Writing

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.

Amy, Beattie, Mean, People, Support, Teach

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.

Believe, Issues, Knows, Life, Onto, Tiny

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Different, Fiction, Involve, Nonfiction, Process, Processes

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