Chad Harbach

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.

Tall people have a real advantage in the world.

There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.

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

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

Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.

I've earned my living in all sorts of terrible ways - as a janitor, a copy editor, a psychotherapist.

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.

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

American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it.

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. But there's just that few days of frustration to get to that point.