Michael Chabon quotes

Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.
-- Michael Chabon

#Stars #Commitment #Body

I feel that in the past, my style has shown itself to be capable of handling dark and light in the same paragraph, or even in the same sentence. That's something I almost take for granted. I think it was more a concern to get the details right and persuasively recreate the world I was trying to write about.
-- Michael Chabon

#Writing #Dark #Past

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.
-- Michael Chabon

#Escaping #Anxiety #Forget

I don't think you could teach someone to be a genius, but you can certainly teach them to not make rookie mistakes and to look at writing the way a writer looks at writing, and not just the way a reader looks at writing. There are a lot of techniques and skills that can be taught that will be helpful to anybody, no matter how gifted they are, and I think writing programs can be very good for people.
-- Michael Chabon

#Mistake #Writing #Thinking

Maybe all wondrous books appear in our lives the way Milo’s tollbooth appears, an inexplicable gift, cast up by some curious chance that comes to feel, after we have finished and fallen in love with the book, like the workings of a secret purpose. Of all the enchantments of beloved books the most mysterious-the most phantasmal-is the way they always seem to come our way precisely when we need them.
-- Michael Chabon

#Book #Secret #Enchantment

There's something inherently more appealing about the idea that you could reveal and tell stories about characters over the course of a TV season - 13 or 26 episodes, whatever it might be - than in the course of one two-hour movie. You can do so many more novelistic kinds of things on a TV show - with time, with gradual development of relationships, and so on - than you could possibly do in a movie. And that is very appealing.
-- Michael Chabon

#Character #Tv Shows #Ideas

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.
-- Michael Chabon

#Risk #Feelings #Moments

The problems you have as a novelist tend to have to do with making a living and trying to find ways to supplement the income you get from writing novels. For a lot of writers, that involves teaching. In my case, so far, I've been able to get by working in Hollywood with this TV stuff I've been doing. And it's very important, because my wife is a writer, too, and we don't have health insurance through any employer.
-- Michael Chabon

#Teaching #Writing #Wife

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.
-- Michael Chabon

#Differences #Denial #Used

For me, the goal is always to write a novel that I myself would like to read. People frequently ask me what my favorite book is, and in effect, there's always a capital-F Favorite, capital-B Book that I would like to write myself someday. I try to go for that ideal of writing the best, most entertaining, most beautifully written book that I possibly can.
-- Michael Chabon

#Book #Writing #Goal

Never say love is "like" anything... It isn't.
-- Michael Chabon

#Love #Inspiring #Love Is

I'm never going to be a Tom Clancy. And I wouldn't really want to be - not that I have anything against him, and I wish him continued success - because that's not why I'm writing novels. I'm doing it because I have to. I feel like I have to, anyway.
-- Michael Chabon

#Writing #Wish #Want

All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction....Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving--amateurs--we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers--should we be lucky enough to find any--some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff that we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.
-- Michael Chabon

#Taken #Greatness #Games

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.
-- Michael Chabon

#Ecosystems #House #Roles

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.
-- Michael Chabon

#Writing #Important #Three

It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology.
-- Michael Chabon

#Apology #Simple #Accepting

I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.
-- Michael Chabon

#Character #Knowing #Giving

They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other
-- Michael Chabon

#Heart #Dark #Listening

The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.
-- Michael Chabon

#Dust #Fire #Broken

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.
-- Michael Chabon

#Influence #Bliss #Novel

When I finish a first draft, it's always just as much of a mess as it's always been. I still make the same mistakes every time.
-- Michael Chabon

#Mistake #Writing #Firsts

Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!
-- Michael Chabon

#Girl #Dark #Eyeglasses

There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworkers and the Bessemer convertor of love.
-- Michael Chabon

#Father #Pittsburgh #Poet

I knew that I shouldn’t have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together.
-- Michael Chabon

#Character #Together #Four

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.
-- Michael Chabon

#Writing #Successful #Two

He is by nature a vegetarian but would never consider giving up meat.
-- Michael Chabon

#Giving Up #Hypocrisy #Meat

With patience and calm, persistence and stoicism, good handwriting and careful labeling, they would meet persecution, indignity, and hardship head-on.
-- Michael Chabon

#Persistence #Hardship #Handwriting

And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others.
-- Michael Chabon

#Men #Air #Debt

We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place...
-- Michael Chabon

#Heart #Ideas #Broken

A true storyteller is really good at writing himself into a corner and then finding a way out of that corner
-- Michael Chabon

#Writing #Way #True Story

I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It's a devastating novel.
-- Michael Chabon

#Revolutionary #Novel

He took a step toward her, than another, tentatively, gathering all his strength, as though about to throw a heavy switch that would, if his calculations were correct, bring light to a hundred cities and ten thousand darkened rooms. He was going to ask her to dance - that was all.
-- Michael Chabon

#Cities #Light #Rooms

Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes what to do with the pieces?
-- Michael Chabon

#Broken #Long #Pieces

The instructor, Ms. Pease, also taught in the church's religious school, and she had a Sunday school manner at once saccharine and condemnatory.
-- Michael Chabon

#Religious #School #Sunday

I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction.
-- Michael Chabon

#Kids #Knowing #Awful

I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.
-- Michael Chabon

#Thinking #Solitude #Fortresses

Every day is like a kid's drawing, offered to you with a strange mix of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.
-- Michael Chabon

#Kids #Drawing #Littles

He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.
-- Michael Chabon

#Moments #Disappointed

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.
-- Michael Chabon

#Powerful #Imagination #Care

As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.
-- Michael Chabon

#Falling In Love #Long #Promise

It was the kind of promise a father makes easily and sincerely, knowing at the same time that it will be impossible to keep. The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart. A game of baseball can't really make a summer day last forever. A home run can't really heal all the broken places in our world, or in a single human heart. And there was no way that Mr. Feld could keep his promise never to leave Ethan again. All parents leave their children one day.
-- Michael Chabon

#Summer #Baseball #Running

Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.
-- Michael Chabon

#Lying #People

The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass toward the play structure. His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.
-- Michael Chabon

#Life #Mother #Boys

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.
-- Michael Chabon

#Book #Fire #Rereading

A father is a man who fails every day.
-- Michael Chabon

#Fathers Day #Father #Men

He comes to this other world and he has to reinvent himself. Again, it felt natural, even though I'd been working really hard trying to come up with something.
-- Michael Chabon

#Other Worlds #Trying #Natural

So it was scary, but that's how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong.
-- Michael Chabon

#Scary #Delight #Scar

Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in.
-- Michael Chabon

#Writing #Finding Yourself #Mind

I suppose there is something appealing about a word that everyone uses with absolute confidence but on whose exact meaning no two people can agree. The word that I'm thinking of right now is genre, one of those French words, like crêpe, that no one can pronounce both correctly and without sounding pretentious.
-- Michael Chabon

#Thinking #Two #People

One knew, of course, that it was not the red cape any more than it was the boots, the tights, the trunks, or the trademark "S" that gave Superman the ability to fly. That ability derived from the effects of the rays of our yellow sun on Superman's alien anatomy, which had evolved under the red sun of Krypton. And yet you had only to tie a towel around your shoulders to feel the strange vibratory pulse of flight stirring in the red sun of your heart.
-- Michael Chabon

#Heart #Krypton #Yellow

As for comics, one has only to turn to the characteristic output of Marvel Comics, for the period from about 1961 to about 1975, to find not an expression of base and cynical impulses but of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism of a kind that may strike us today, God help us, as quaint, but which nevertheless appealed, in story after story, to ideals such as tolerance, technological optimism, and self-sacrifice for the benefit of others.
-- Michael Chabon

#Sacrifice #Self #Expression

[Comics] were viewed as the literary equivalent of bubblegum cards, meant to be poked into the spokes of a young mind where they would produce a satisfying but entirely bogus rumble of pleasure.
-- Michael Chabon

#Mind #Cards #Pleasure

To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal . "You weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in.
-- Michael Chabon

#Phones #Editors #Houdini

[I]n 1938, Superman appeared. He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, by a couple of Jewish boys who had imbued him with the powers of a hundred men, of a distant world, and of the full measure of their bespectacled adolescent hopefulness and desperation.
-- Michael Chabon

#Couple #Boys #Men

The rest of Sitka's homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms.
-- Michael Chabon

#Passion #Alcohol #Way

Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.
-- Michael Chabon

#Miracle #Prove

The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure there. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past. The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by the neighbors.
-- Michael Chabon

#Children #Taken #Adventure

Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves, if he doesn't court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family or party apparatchiks... the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.
-- Michael Chabon

#Pain #Party #Wrath

Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs.
-- Michael Chabon

#Tuesday #Reptiles #Afternoon

Horror grows impatient, rhetorically, with the Stoic fatalism of Ecclesiastes. That we are all going to die, that death mocks and cancels every one of our acts and attainments and every moment of our life histories, this knowledge is to storytelling what rust is to oxidation; the writer of horror holds with those who favor fire. The horror writer is not content to report on death as the universal system of human weather; he or she chases tornadoes. Horror is Stoicism with a taste for spectacle.
-- Michael Chabon

#Weather #Fire #Rust

The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward
-- Michael Chabon

#Steps #Culture #Devolution

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.
-- Michael Chabon

#Men #Light #Mind

It took Marvel Comics years to begin to put together any worthwhile superheroines. The first crop was, to a gal, embarrassingly disappointing. They had all the measly powers that fifties and sixties male chauvinism could contrive to bestow on a superwoman.
-- Michael Chabon

#Years #Together #Firsts

Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure, in the truest sense of that overtaxed word: a setting forth into trackless lands that might have come to existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them.
-- Michael Chabon

#Adventure #Eye #Land

Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.
-- Michael Chabon

#Stories #World #Stuff

If children are not permitted-not taught-to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world...?
-- Michael Chabon

#Children #World #Taught

There was a sort of irony in the fact that these [superhero] characters - many of whom in that period, the Golden Age, had been evolved to fight the Nazis - were themselves very much in the Nazi ideal. The idea that you can solve problems through physical strength, by being stronger and more dominant and more powerful - that is fascism. I mean, that's it, that's the essence of fascism. I don't think the creators of the superheroes or the kids who were reading them at the time were the slightest bit aware of it.
-- Michael Chabon

#Powerful #Reading #Character

I was surprised that my wife thought it was a good idea, then again with my agent, another woman, then my editor, another woman - in spite of the fact that all three of them reacted positively I still have this fear.
-- Michael Chabon

#Editors #Ideas #Wife

I have a deadline. I'm glad. I think that will help me get it done.
-- Michael Chabon

#Thinking #Done #Helping

Do what you gotta do and stay fly
-- Michael Chabon

Dr. Roboy, in Litvak's measured view, had a vice common to believers: He was all strategy and no tactics. He was prone to move for the sake of moving, too focused on the goal to bother with the intervening sequence.
-- Michael Chabon

#Moving #Views #Goal

Childhood is a branch of cartography.
-- Michael Chabon

#Childhood #Branches #Cartography

She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.
-- Michael Chabon

#Girl #Eye #Hands

I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.
-- Michael Chabon

#Memories #Smell #Self

People keep saying, 'Oh, you're getting all these great reviews, that must make you really happy.' I guess it does, but mostly it's just a relief.
-- Michael Chabon

#People #Relief #Doe

Every time another review comes out I let out a deep breath.
-- Michael Chabon

#Reviews #Deep Breath

What's going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I'll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it.
-- Michael Chabon

#Divorce #Trying #Crafts

Love is like falconry," he said. "Don't you think that's true, Cleveland?" "Never say love is like anything." said Cleveland. "It isn't.
-- Michael Chabon

#Thinking #Love Is #Cleveland

Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted-not taught-to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?
-- Michael Chabon

#Art #Children #Adventure