Chad Harbach Quotes

I got a couple of stories published, but the kind of money you were making for publishing a short story, I could see I wasn't going to make a living at it.

My mother and my father were teachers. My grandmother and my grandfather were teachers. This is something I really know about. Even when I was a kid, it was a profession my father couldn't stay in, because he couldn't make enough money.

You don't become a poet if you want to make any money.

I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money, to finance this earnest work, and then I chucked it out.

In all honesty, at that time, I never saw myself as an author... I was just a Mom in a state of panic, trying to enter a short story contest to win the prize money in order to keep the lights on in my home.

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

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

It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.

Well, yes, as I was a rather bad actor then and I wasn't making enough money, I thought, to make enough money to not make money as an actor, I'd better do some writing.

My dad was a high school teacher and made no money.

My son tried to work in films and he ultimately gave it up, he finally couldn't make a living, he couldn't support himself. He worked all the time and he didn't make enough money to have a house, have an apartment.

One of the things I learned from my father, and it did not serve me well at all, was that he was a successful writer, he earned a living. And it was a shock for me to find out that it was actually hard to make a living as a writer.

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

I love Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore: such great short-story writers.

Writers of literature make very little money.

A novel may take anywhere from two to five years to write and, in the end, you might manage a couple of thousand dollars on it, no more.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one.

I'm missing work. We didn't have enough money for preschool. I had a panic attack. I couldn't do it. I became one of those horrible foster parents who give the kids back.

I refuse to lose this race because I didn't have enough money.

We have hardly enough money to last till the end of March.

I did 12 shows in 13 weeks at a summer theater in Maine where we were paid $35 a week. After taxes and $25 for room and board, I had enough money for a pack of cigarettes and a bowl of lobster bisque.

I have a background writing screenplays and teleplays. I've tried to write prose and fiction but never really completed anything I thought worthy of publication or worthy of anyone else to even look at.

I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.

I recently discovered the work of Giorgio Manganelli, who wrote a collection called 'Centuria,' which contains 100 stories, each of them about a page long. They're somewhat surreal and extremely dense, at once fierce and purifying, the equivalent of a shot of grappa. I find it helpful to read one before sitting down to write.

One of the nice things about 'The New Yorker' is they let you write stories that sometimes end up almost half a book.