Top 50 Chad Harbach Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

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

— Chad Harbach

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

— Chad Harbach

5. “So much of one’s life was spent reading; it made sense not to do it alone.”

— Chad Harbach

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6. “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

7. “Tall people have a real advantage in the world.”

— Chad Harbach

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “But people didn’t forgive you for doing what felt right-that was the last thing they forgave you for.”

— Chad Harbach

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

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

— Chad Harbach

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

— Chad Harbach

18. “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

19. “You are skilled. I exhort you.”

— Chad Harbach

20. “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

21. “Henry,” he said. “You are skilled. I exhort you.”

— Chad Harbach

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

— Chad Harbach

23. “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

24. “Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can’t get anywhere else.”

— Chad Harbach

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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.”

— Chad Harbach

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

— Chad Harbach

29. “Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.”

— Chad Harbach

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Every dude in your high school wasn’t striving to be the best poet because then he’d get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.”

— Chad Harbach

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

— Chad Harbach

35. “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

36. “In fact, theres a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.”

— Chad Harbach

37. “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

38. “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.”

— Chad Harbach

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

— Chad Harbach

40. “I play American football every Saturday, which I find calming.”

— Chad Harbach

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “This was the dreamy, paradisiacal side of domestic ritual: when all the days were possessed of the same minutiae precisely because you wanted them to be.”

— Chad Harbach

45. “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

46. “Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.”

— Chad Harbach

47. “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

48. “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

49. “For many years I didn’t have health insurance.”

— Chad Harbach

50. “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