Harbach Quotes & Sayings

You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money. — Chad Harbach

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

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

A lot of writers choose to live in New York, partly because of the literary culture here, and partly because Brooklyn's a pretty nice place to live. And a lot of writers who might not geographically reside in New York still point their ambitions towards New York in some sense. — 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

Marinda Harbach explained why we have such a bloody history. "Serious predators," she said, "do not kill one another. Never have. A tiger understands, for example, it's dangerous to attack another tiger. It's not at all certain who will end up dead." But humans had never been serious predators. On the contrary, they'd been innocuous creatures, had eaten whatever came to hand, and never developed the instinct to avoid quarrels. "After all," she said, "when a fight breaks out between two monkeys, somebody gets a few lumps, but that's about all. They actually enjoy it. Brain scans make the point beyond question. By the time the monkeys discovered advanced weaponry, it was too late. — Jack McDevitt

It dawned on him - as it hadn't before; he was dense, he was slow - that his parents were five hundred miles away. They could make him come home, they could refuse to pay the portion of his tuition they'd agreed to pay, but they couldn't see his jeans. "Understood," he said. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are skilled. I exhort you. — 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

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

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

3. There are three stages. Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
33. Do not confuse the first and third stages. Thoughtless being is attained by everyone, the return to thoughtless being by a very few. — Chad Harbach

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium. — 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

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

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

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

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

So much of one's life was spent reading; it made sense not to do it alone. — 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

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

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

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. But there's just that few days of frustration to get to that point. — 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

The problem, like most problems in life, probably had to do with his footwork. — 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

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

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

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

He felt a touch of sadness now that it had happened, now that he knew what it was like. Not because it wasn't enjoyable, or wouldn't be repeated, but because one more of life's mysteries had been revealed. — 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

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

When a lovely flame dies,
Smoke gets in your eyes. — Otto Harbach

My favorite sports novel is End Zone by Delillo. It's such a great looking book too, the black cover with the football player on it. It's just a fantastic little book. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting Henry at shortstop - it was like taking a painting that had been shoved in a closet and hanging it in the ideal spot. You instantly forgot what the room had looked like before. — 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

They checked Westish Field, and then the big stone bowl of the football stadium. Nothing. There weren't many electric lights nearby, and the moon that hung between banks of clouds was as slender as an eyelash. Schwartz had never experienced this kind of darkness before enrolling at Westish; in his first days on campus he'd been afraid to fall asleep, as if the night and the quiet might swallow him whole. Now he wondered whether he could ever live in a city again. "I don't suppose he's out drowning his sorrows," Owen said. Henry never went to the bars unless he — Chad Harbach

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

A soul isn't something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. — Chad Harbach

You don't have to even see the common man anymore if you don't want to! Only through the telescope on your yacht. — 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

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. — 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