110 Quotes by 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"You are skilled. I exhort you."

"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."

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

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

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