Quotes from 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.

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

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

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

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

You know, it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.

For many years I didn't have health insurance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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