Chad Harbach Quotes

Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating 'Moby-Dick.'

Captain Ahab was a man possessed with an obsessional drive to pursue the white whale which had harmed him - which had torn his leg out - to the ends of the Earth, no matter what happened. In the final scene of the novel, Captain Ahab is being borne out to sea, wrapped around the white whale with the rope of his own harpoon and going obviously to his death. It was a scene of almost suicidal finality.

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale... from hell's heart I stab at thee.

'Moby-Dick' has a remarkable way of resonating with whatever is going on in the world at that particular moment.

In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week.

When you look at almost every submarine movie, to some degree or another, there's this 'Moby Dick' element, this Ahab element to them.

By the 1880s, English translations of both the French and the Russian editions were available, and Americans began to read 'War and Peace.'

Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.

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

I love to read. I was in AP English in high school, and we were assigned books every few months. 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' are two of my favorite ones.

My favorite poem ever was 'Annabel Lee' by Edgar Allan Poe.

Besides all those whaling details, Moby Dick is about someone who's looking for something so huge, something they've wanted all their life, yet they know when they find it, it will kill them.

Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

If you live on Nantucket, you can't avoid its history, and 'Moby Dick' is the way most of us get into Nantucket's history.

The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: 'Moby-Dick.'

'Of Mice and Men,' Steinbeck's fifth novel, adheres to a simple dramatic structure, which observes the classic Aristotelian unities of time, place and action.

Ken Starr has become a prosecutorial Captain Ahab.

In college, I discovered the Joyce Carol Oates short story 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' which is definitely one of the most incredibly unnerving, frightening short stories ever written.

Nantucket was a Quaker-based culture, so they were not readers. There's a great Nantucket-based novel from the 19th century that Melville read for his research for 'Moby-Dick': 'Miriam Coffin' by Joseph Hart.

Most people think of 'Wuthering Heights' as romantic; it's really not about that at all.

I can only remember two books from college that moved me: E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'

Hemingway's short story 'Hills Like White Elephants' is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory,' which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.

One of the stories that really impressed me was 'Anna Karenina.' As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do.

The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.