Chad Harbach Quotes

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

In terms of fiction, I'd rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

I like going back and writing fiction.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.

I would never make up a character who didn't exist or an event that didn't transpire. If you're a real writer, you have other tools in your toolbox to build drama.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

Fiction is a report from the interior.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

They say that every writer, they write about himself, and I think that to a certain extent that is true. But also we are creators of fiction.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.