Chad Harbach Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's quite a feeling to finish something you have been 10 years beholden to and to have a clean slate.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Just as abruptly, he'd become a father. While preparing the book for publication, he'd been dating a woman named Sarah Coowe, an infectious-disease specialist at MGH. They were evenly matched in many ways: sharp-dressed, sharp-tongued, and devoted to their careers and personal freedoms to the exclusion of any serious interest in so-called romance. They spent ten months together. A few weeks after they broke up -- Sarah initiated the split -- she called to say that she was pregnant. "It's mine?" asked Affenlight. "He or she," replied Sarah, "is mostly mine."

They named the child Pella -- that was Affenlight's idea, though Sarah certainly had the final say. For those first couple of years, Affenlight conspired as often as he could to show up at Sarah and Pella's Kendall Square townhouse with expensive takeout and a new toy. He was fascinated with his daughter, with the sheer reality of her, a beautiful something where before there'd been nothing. He hated kissing her good-bye; and yet he relished, couldn't keep himself from relishing, the total quiet of his townhouse when he walked in, the scattered books and papers and lack of baby-proofing.

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

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.

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.

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.

That was the idiot hopefulness of humans, always to love what was unformed. Really it made no sense. What were the old hoping the young would become? Something other than old? It hadn't happened yet, but the old kept trying.

By the old she meant everyone who loved something younger . . . Everyone was always reaching back through the past, past their own mistakes. You could say that young people were desired because they had smooth bodies and excellent reproductive chances, but you'd mostly be missing the point. There was something much sadder in it than that. Something like constant regret, the sense that your whole life was an error, a mistake, that you were desperate for a redo.

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.

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.

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

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.

these would be worn throughout Coshwale's omnicompetent

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.

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.

A gaggle of sophomore girls wavered by in their heels, en route from Bartleby's to some house party. No two of their tube tops or flouncy miniskirts were precisely alike, in cut or in color, and these slight variations made the outfits look all the more carefully orchestrated as they linked arms and passed by, pretending not to listen. Schwartz tried to comfort himself with a long look at their ten slender thighs turned pink by the cold, the good odds he'd been between four or six of those thighs on oblivious drunken nights, but it was useless, the girls looked absurd to him now, and it no longer seemed that the universe contained an endless supply of anonymous pink thighs to which he could escape from his troubles. Pella would never dress like that.

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

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.

Schartz would never live in a world so open. His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent. He'd never be as good as he wanted to be, not at baseball, not at football, not at reading Greek or taking the LSAT. And beyond all that he'd never be as _good_ as he wanted to be. He'd never found anything inside himself that was really good and pure, that wasn't double-edged, that couldn't just as easily become its opposite. He had tried and failed to find that thing and he would continue to try and fail, or else he would leave off trying and keep on failing. He had no art to call his own. He knew how to motivate people, manipulate people, move them around, this was his only skill. He was like a minor Greek god you've barely heard of, who sees through the glamour of the armor and down into the petty complexity of each soldier's soul. And in the end is powerless to bring about anything resembling his vision. The loftier, arbitrary gods intervene.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Just for the sake of my own stupid pleasure

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.

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.

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

You are skilled. I exhort you.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

he took her sweatshirt and hung it on a wooden

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.

I play American football every Saturday, which I find calming.

People loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering.

I'm a staunch monogamist. In practice, if not in theory. I can't help it. Do I acknowledge the oppressive, regressive nature of sexual exclusivity? Yes. Do I want that exclusivity very badly for myself? Also yes. There's probably some sort of way in which that's not a paradox. Maybe I believe in love.

We don't have a single goddamn thing left to prove to anyone. We're proven. Today we play.

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.

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

To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.

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

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

After those four years, he returned to the Midwest. He'd turned twenty-five, the Age of Unfolding, and it was time to write a novel, the way his hero had. He moved to a cheap apartment in Chicago and set to work, but even as the pages accumulated, despair set in. 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 those 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 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. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book's very first one, and its last unwritten one, and ever sentence in between. Every phrase, every word, exhausted him.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

And as the end arrived and his breath left him he couldn't remember or imagine ever having cared.