Chad Harbach Quotes & Sayings

Affenlight leaned across it his wrist brushed against the mouse that was tethered to Owen's computer. With a whir the screen came to life. He couldn't help but look. Open in the internet browser was a picture of a man, a muscled, bronzed, hairless, oiled twentysomething man, sprawled in a wooden chair with one hand cupped over the tip of his erect and — Chad Harbach

He wished that college required you to use your body more, forced you to remember that life was lived in four dimensions. — Chad Harbach

It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of these sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight's mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. — Chad Harbach

he took her sweatshirt and hung it on a wooden — Chad Harbach

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

In his life he'd passed through long periods of gratefulness and good cheer, but he'd scarcely even imagined this level of thorough contentment with things as they were. His chronic restlessness had fled. He wanted nothing new. He wanted only to hang on to what he had. It was almost excruciating. — Chad Harbach

Everyone expected him to succeed, no matter what the arena, and so failure, even temporary failure, had ceased to be an option. — Chad Harbach

Had he learned - would he ever learn - to discard the thoughts he could not use? — Chad Harbach

Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, sometimes even surprising myself. — Chad Harbach

To reach a ball he has never reached before, to extend himself to the very limits of his range, and then a step farther, this is the shortstop's dream. — Chad Harbach

AVERT DISASTER, in fact, would have been a perfect school motto - the purpose of the place, as far as Schwartz could tell, was to keep three thousand would-be maniacs sedated by boredom until a succession of birthdays transformed them into adults. — Chad Harbach

Locker rooms, in Schwartz's experience, were always underground, like bunkers and bomb shelters. This was less a structural necessity than a symbolic one. The locker room protected you when you were most vulnerable: just before a game, and just after (And halfway through, if the game was football) Before the game, you took off the uniform you wore to face the world and you put on the one you wore to face your opponent. In between you were naked in every way. After the game ended, you couldn't carry your game-time emotions out into the world - you'd be put in an asylum if you did - so you went underground and purged them. You yelled and threw things and pounded on your locker, in anguish or joy. You hugged your teammate, or bitched him out, or punched him in the face. Whatever happened, the locker room remained a haven. — Chad Harbach

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

Henry," he said. "You are skilled. I exhort you. — 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

here. Here he was bound to seem absurd. He — Chad Harbach

The idea of the writer who writes nineteen novels, with various ups and downs and levels of experimentation, isn't around so much now. There's a focus, I think, on fewer books, with more pressure on each book to succeed. With that there comes, I think, a certain pressure towards shapeliness in fiction. Towards neatness. And I think writers feel that, and it can effect how they write. — Chad Harbach

All he'd ever wanted was for nothing to change. Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever. It sounded crazy when you said it like that, but that was what baseball had promised him, what Westish College had promised him, what Schwartzy had promised him. The dream of every day the same. Every day was like the day before but a little bit better. You ran the stadium a little faster. You bench-pressed a little more. You hit the ball a little harder in the cage; you watched the tape with Schwartzy afterward and gained a little insight into your swing. Your swing grew a little simpler. Everything grew simpler, little by little. You ate the same food, work up at the same time, wore the same clothes. Hitches, bad habits, useless thoughts
whatever you didn't need slowly fell away. Whatever was simple and useful remained. You improved little by little til the day it all became perfect and stayed that way. Forever. — Chad Harbach

Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work. — Chad Harbach

I think that it is very interesting to write about a team because a team is a group of people who work in very close quarters and have very intense relationships so - in my days of playing sports, I was very rarely on a team that did not have it's own peculiar dynamic, and you wind up having very intense feelings for good and for bad about these people with whom you spend many hours a day. — Chad Harbach

Heat radiated off Henry's face. Salty snot ran down his upper lip. A majestic fart propelled him to the top of Section 12, just at the springing of the stadium's curve. He slapped the sign as if high-fiving a teamate. It gave back a game shudder. He was crusing now, darkness be damned, stripping off his sweatshirt and his long underwear top without breaking stride. — Chad Harbach

April. Henry passed the word into sounds so small their sense disappeared, as if he'd wandered into the wide spaces that separate the solid parts of the molecule. — Chad Harbach

She's been reading too much, he thought -had drifted across that line that separated what you might find in a book from what you might do — Chad Harbach

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

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. — Chad Harbach

It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand. — Chad Harbach

I think people have the wrong idea of 'Moby Dick' as this somber, boring thing. — Chad Harbach

Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do. — Chad Harbach

My break was a week long, but we stayed in Rome for three. Afterward we flew to San Francisco, where David's latest project was located; I felt elated, like I'd bypassed Yale and young adulthood and graduated straight into the world. When I recall those first weeks with David among the crumbling buildings of Rome, weeks of feeling deliciously older than old, giddy with my own seriousness, it's probably no accident that I can't think of my life without using the word ruined. — Chad Harbach

Owen," Henry said excitedly, "I think Coach wants you to hit for Meccini."
Owen closed The Voyage of the Beagle, on which he had recently embarked. "Really?"
"Runners on first and second," Rick said. "I bet he wants you to bunt."
"What's the bunt sign?"
"Two tugs on the left earlobe," Henry told him. "But first he has to give the indicator, which is squeeze the belt. But if he goes to his cap with either hand or says your first name, that's the wipe-off, and then you have to wait and see whether
"
"Forget it," Owen said. "I'll just bunt. — Chad Harbach

Opentoe College had some sort of evangelical mission that involved perpetual kindness and hopelessly outdated uniforms. The Harpooners hated them for it. It was unspeakably infuriating that the one school in the UMSCAC that spent less money on its baseball program than Westish always managed to kick their ass. The Opentoe players never talked even the mildest forms of smack. If you worked a walk, the first baseman would say, "Good eye." If you ripped a three-run triple, the third baseman would say, "Nice rip." They smiled when they were behind, and when they were ahead they looked pensive and slightly sad. Their team name was the Holy Poets. — Chad Harbach

When I write for 'n+1,' I begin by doing a lot of reading, to try to convince myself I'm not stupid. Then I scribble down a paragraph here, a paragraph there, when a notion strikes. Then I see if I can arrange those notions in a way that yields an argument. — Chad Harbach

Life was long, unless you died, and he didn't intend to spend the next sixty years talking about the last twenty-two. — Chad Harbach

Henry knew better than to want freedom. The only life worth living was the unfree life, the life Schwartz had taught him, the life in which you were chained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect. Then the days were sky-blue spaces you moved through with ease. You made sacrifices and the sacrifices made sense. You ate till you were full and then you drank SuperBoost, because every ounce of muscle meant something. You stoked the furnace, fed the machine. No matter how hard you worked, you could never feel harried or hurried, because you were doing what you wanted and so one moment simply produced the next. — 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

Why would anyone want to fight Henry?" Loondorf looked hurt.
"Because he's a ballplayer."
"So?"
"So he's a baller. He's got cash, chains, crisp clothes. He's got a hat that says Yankees and it's the real deal, yo. He didn't buy it at no yard sale. He walks into a bar and girls are like damn. Dudes get jealous. They want to get in his face, prove they're somebody."
"They want to take down the man," Steve said helpfully. — Chad Harbach

For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. 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.
Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed SOMETIMES, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer
you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. — Chad Harbach

You told me once that a soul isn't something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. And you did that with more dedication than most, that work of building a soul-not for your own benefit but for the benefit of those that knew you. — Chad Harbach

A moment would come, and then another, and then another. These moments would be his life. — 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

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

Neither had said so, but she could tell. Unless she was just paranoid, living in her head again, but you always lived in your head and you had to go with what you felt. — Chad Harbach

the chapel bells. Unlike most of his — Chad Harbach

But people didn't forgive you for doing what felt right-that was the last thing they forgave you for. — Chad Harbach

For me, the process always has to be pretty intense. I could never write just two or three days a week. It had to be every day. — Chad Harbach

You know, it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money. — 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

I've earned my living in all sorts of terrible ways - as a janitor, a copy editor, a psychotherapist. — Chad Harbach

There were 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 self patience. — Chad Harbach

There's certainly a large literature around baseball in the U.S. — Chad Harbach

She misunderstood his life. It wasn't that he wanted everything to be difficult but that everything was difficult. Forget money. He wasn't smart the way she was. The only thing he knew how to do was motivate other people. Which amounted to nothing, in the end. Manipulation, playing with dolls. What wouldn't he give to have a talent of his own, talent like Henry's? Nothing. He'd give it all. Those who cannot do, coach. — Chad Harbach

Only here, long after midnight, while everyone else was sleeping, when nothing was expected of him, could Schwartz convince himself that he was working hard enough. These hours felt stolen, added to his life. The voice fell quiet. — Chad Harbach

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

I've been a Brewers fan since birth. — Chad Harbach

I was a ballplayer, but only for a limited time. I grew up playing in Wisconsin. It's a very sports-centric part of the country that I grew up in and I played a lot of sports, but baseball first and foremost. I played through high school. I was a middle-infielder. — Chad Harbach

these would be worn throughout Coshwale's omnicompetent — Chad Harbach

Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars. — Chad Harbach

It's very hard right now to be a pro sports fan. The economics of this stuff is abysmal. — 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

That was what made the story so epic: the player, the hero, had to suffer mightily en route to his final triumph. Schwartz knew that people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering. Most people couldn't do this alone; they needed a coach. A good coach made you suffer in a way that suited you. A bad coach made everyone suffer in the same way, and so was more like a torturer. — Chad Harbach

In fact, there's a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted. — Chad Harbach

Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me. — 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

She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights. — Chad Harbach

Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry. — Chad Harbach

I play American football every Saturday, which I find calming. — Chad Harbach

Just for the sake of my own stupid pleasure — Chad Harbach

There were no words for that, no ceremony that would garantee your future. Every day was just that: a day, a blank, a nothing, in which you had to invent yourself and your friendship from scratch. The weight of everything you'd ever donewas nothing. It could all vanish just like that. Just like this. — Chad Harbach

When a philosopher wants high ceilings, he goes outside'. He doesn't buy an oversize house that requires massive amounts of dwindling resources to heat in the winter — 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

That little school in the crook of the baseball glove that is Wisconsin. He'd — Chad Harbach

You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard. And trying hard, as everyone told him, was wrong, all wrong. — Chad Harbach

Henry had never felt so happy. Freshperson year had been one thing, an adventure, an exhilaration, all in all a success, but it had also been exhausting, a constant struggle and adjustment and tumult. Now he was locked in. Every day that summer had the same framework, the alarm at the same time, meals and workouts and shifts and SuperBoost at the same times, over and over, and it was that sameness, that repetition, that gave life meaning. He savored the tiny variations, the incremental improvements
tuna fish on his salad instead of turkey; tow extra reps on the bench press. Every move he made had purpose. — Chad Harbach

For many years I didn't have health insurance. — Chad Harbach

By absorbing so many books he was trying to purge his own failure as a writer. It wasn't working, but he feared what would happen if he stopped. — Chad Harbach

Pella felt like she knew a lot about men, but she couldn't imagine what it would be like to be one of them, to be in a room of them with no woman present, to participate in their silent rights of contrition and redemption. — Chad Harbach

Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed _sometimes_, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer
you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error. The scouts cared little for Henry's superhuman grace; insofar as they cared they were suckered-in aesthetes and shitty scouts. Can you perform on demand, like a car, a furnace, a gun? Can you make that throw one hundred times out of a hundred? If it can't be a hundred, it had better be ninety-nine. — Chad Harbach

The only life worth living was the unfree life ... the life in which you were chained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect. — Chad Harbach

Tall people have a real advantage in the world. — 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

Sometimes a cloudless swatch of sky would blow past the moon, and Pella could see the outline of Mike's face in a slightly sharper relief. It was strange the way he loved her: a sidelong and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention. Like their first meeting on the steps of the gym, when he'd hardly so much as glanced at her. With David and every guy before David, what passed for love had always been eye to eye, nose to nose; she felt watched, observed, like the prize at the zoo, and she wound up pacing, preening, watching back, to fit the part. Whereas Mike was always beside her. She would stand at the kitchen window and look out at the quad, at the Melville statue and beyond that the beach and the rolling lake, and realize that Make, for however long, had been standing beside her, staring at the same thing. — Chad Harbach

It was strange the way he loved her; a side long and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention — Chad Harbach

He paused in his gyrations to give Schwartz a high five. "I'm wearing my cap askew," [Owen] said. — Chad Harbach

The doctor said a ball hit me. But I don't remember batting." "You were in the dugout. Henry made a bad throw." "Henry did? Really? Are you sure?" "Yes." "Well, it's always the ones you least suspect." Owen let his eyes fall shut. "I don't remember anything at all. Was I reading?" Affenlight nodded. "I warned you. It's a dangerous pastime. — Chad Harbach

People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite. — Chad Harbach

But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric - not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn't storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football.You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see? — Chad Harbach

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes. — Chad Harbach

What would he say to her, if he was going to speak truly? He didn't know. Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn't plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone woud catch them
you had to throw out words you knew no one would catch. You had to send your words out where they weren't yours anymore. It felt better to talk with a ball in your hand, it felt better to let the ball do the talking. But the world, the nonbaseball world, the world of love and sex and jobs and friends, was made of words. — Chad Harbach

Before long four dozen balls lay scattered at the base of the fence, a harvest of dirty white fruit. — Chad Harbach

You are skilled. I exhort you. — Chad Harbach

Pella felt relieved to sit across from someone who was willing to act so unreservedly glum in her presence, as if she weren't there. David never did that
David's eyes were always right on her, probing, admiring, assessing, enjoying. That was what he called love. — Chad Harbach

Getting your foot in the door with some publishing people can be important when you're starting out as a writer, but it's also not enough to get you where you need to be. — Chad Harbach

American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it. — Chad Harbach

There's so much standing around,' Owen said when Henry asked him what he liked about the game. 'And pockets in the uniforms. — Chad Harbach

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. — Chad Harbach

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

Literature could turn you into an asshole: he'd learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties. — Chad Harbach

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. — Chad Harbach

The girl-women scampered around a beach house in various states of preparative undress, wriggled into sundresses, shook out their hair ... They possessed a veneer of hotness, certainly, a sheen of sexual health. You could call them clean, chromatic, shapely, sun-kissed, and yes, even HOT
but you could never call them lovely, not in the way that Owen was lovely. — Chad Harbach

Layers like a bad Van Gogh. Pella felt little beads — Chad Harbach