Chad Harbach Quotes

Chekhov was as important to me as anybody as a writer.

Janet Malcolm's probably the writer I most admire and who's most influenced me.

Jean Plaidy was the greatest influence on me.

My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.

We like to pile language on language. Hunter [ S. Thompson] was an influence on me, no doubt about it.

I'll leave it to other people to evaluate the legacy of my book, but I'm very moved when musicians tell me that they've been inspired by my book.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

One of the influences of Kafka over later writers is not so much in the content of his work as in its form.

I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

I am a big devourer of James Baldwin.

The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern.

I could tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, it's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it.

Elizabeth Bishop in particular had a big impact on me personally as well as artistically. Her insistence on clarity is something I rate very highly.

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you.

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.

The books I read, if they intrude on my writing, do so as weather will pass through and touch a landscape - affecting it, yes, but only now and then leaving a permanent mark.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

As a younger person, I was obsessed with Ray Bradbury, and I think his stories did more to shape me as a storyteller than anybody else - even though, when I read them now, a lot of them seem overly sentimental. But that's probably the writer that I've thought about the most, even though I don't necessarily like a lot of his work.

A guy named Peter Rabe wrote a batch of books for Gold Medal in the '50s, and he was absolutely the single largest influence on writing style. I was completely in love with the way the man wrote.

Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly.

I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.

Samuel Beckett. He is a kind of hero for me.