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.
Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
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.
It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand.
To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.
. . . people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering.
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.
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. "
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.
Tall people have a real advantage in the world.
But baseball was different. . . You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you f****d 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?. . . 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.
It's very hard right now to be a pro sports fan. The economics of this stuff is abysmal.
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 teammate. 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.
People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are skilled. I exhort you.
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.