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.

source: - Michael Chabon (2012). “Telegraph Avenue”, p.13, HarperCollins UK

Topics: 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.

Topics: Writing, Dark, Past

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

source: - "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay". Book by Michael Chabon, September 19, 2000.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Mistake, Writing, Thinking

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.

Topics: 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.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands”, p.163, Open Road Media

Topics: 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.

Topics: Teaching, Writing, Wife, Making A Living

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

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “Wonder Boys”, p.197, Open Road Media

Topics: 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.

Topics: Book, Writing, Goal

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Writing, Wish, Want, Continued Success

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.

Topics: Taken, Greatness, Games, Negligence, Retelling

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

Topics: Ecosystems, House, Roles, First Amendment

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.

Topics: Writing, Important, Three

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

Topics: Apology, Simple, Accepting, I Apologize

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

Topics: 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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Dust, Fire, Broken, Reunited, Broken World

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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!

source: - "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay". Book by Michael Chabon, September 19, 2000.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Father, Pittsburgh, Poet

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.

Topics: Writing, Successful, Two

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Persistence, Hardship, Handwriting, Labeling, Stoicism

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.

Topics: Men, Air, Debt, Purchasing, Suave

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...

Topics: Heart, Ideas, Broken

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

Topics: Writing, Way, True Story

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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?

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands”, p.61, Open Road Media

Topics: Kids, Knowing, Awful

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Kids, Drawing, Littles, Inscrutable

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

Topics: Moments, Disappointed

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

source: - Michael Chabon (2012). “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content): A Novel”, p.272, Random House

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

source: - Michael Chabon (2002). “Summerland”, Miramax

Topics: Summer, Baseball, Running

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Book, Fire, Rereading, Cholera, Book Love

A father is a man who fails every day.

source: - Michael Chabon (2012). “Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son”, p.7, Harper Collins

Topics: 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.

Topics: Other Worlds, Trying, Natural, Working Really Hard, Trying Hard

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Writing, Finding Yourself, Mind, Pasteur

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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Heart, Krypton, Yellow, Trademarks, Yellow Sun

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.

Topics: Sacrifice, Self, Expression, God Help, Marvel Comics

[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.

Topics: Mind, Cards, Pleasure, Young Minds

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.

Topics: Phones, Editors, Houdini, Phone Booth

[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.

source: - "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay". Book by Michael Chabon, 2000.

Topics: Couple, Boys, Men, Hopefulness

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.

Topics: Passion, Alcohol, Way, Crimes Of Passion, Shorthand

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Pain, Party, Wrath, Marvelous, Disapproval

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.

Topics: Tuesday, Reptiles, Afternoon, Brooding

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.

Topics: Weather, Fire, Rust, Fatalism, Ecclesiastes

The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward

Topics: Steps, Culture, Devolution, American Culture

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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Years, Together, Firsts, Chauvinism, Superwoman

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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Stories, World, Stuff, Bite Me

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

source: - "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son". Book by Michael Chabon, September 29, 2009.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Powerful, Reading, Character, Physical Strength

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.

Topics: Editors, Ideas, Wife

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

Topics: Thinking, Done, Helping

Do what you gotta do and stay fly

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.

Topics: Moving, Views, Goal, Intervening, Sequence

Childhood is a branch of cartography.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Girl, Eye, Hands, Delicate Life, Hands And Feet

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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: People, Relief, Doe

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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?

Topics: Art, Children, Adventure

Nothing is boring exept to people who aren't really paying attention.

Topics: People, Attention, Boring

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

Topics: Men, Laughing, Dark Humor

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.

Topics: Book, Secret, Enchantment, Wondrous

There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “Wonder Boys”, p.44, Open Road Media

Topics: Animal, Embarrassing

For me, nostalgia is an involuntary emotion. ... I think it's just a natural human response to loss.

source: - "Michael Chabon’s Vinyl Draft". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. September 2012.

Topics: Loss, Thinking, Emotion

Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.

source: - Michael Chabon (2013). “Summerland”, p.24, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Invisible, Untouchables, Nevertheless

Not only would I never want to belong to any club that would have me for a member--if elected I would wear street shoes onto the squash court and set fire to the ballroom curtains.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “Wonder Boys”, p.145, Open Road Media

Topics: Fire, Shoes, Squash

I do have a collection of mid-century, small-press science fiction and fantasy hardcovers that is my most focused and dedicated collection. Everything else I tend more to acquire or amass than collect. I have vinyl records I listen to all the time when I work. But I don’t collect records. I just buy records where the price seems right and it’s music I actually listen to.

source: - "Michael Chabon’s Vinyl Draft". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. September 2012.

Topics: Fiction, Records, Fantasy, Science Fiction And Fantasy

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “Wonder Boys”, p.42, Open Road Media

Topics: Zoos, Animal, Dams, Vandalism, Recklessness

... and because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”, p.19, Open Road Media

Topics: Perfect, Perception, Half

In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time.

Topics: Lying, Men, Style, Under Pressure

He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel. “Just watch me,” he said.

source: - Michael Chabon (2012). “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content): A Novel”, p.420, Random House

Topics: Ideas, Feels Just, Long

That's why school was invented - to give your parents some peace and quiet during the day.

source: - "Michael Chabon’s Vinyl Draft". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. September, 2012.

Topics: School, Giving, Parent, Peace And Quiet

I can imagine anything except having no imagination.

Topics: Imagination, Imagine, I Can

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.

Topics: Stars, Lying, Writing, Ambulance

Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn't Lasker. This guy-' She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.

Topics: Light, Hands, Years

All male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “Wonder Boys”, p.359, Open Road Media

Topics: Adventure, Men, Long, Male Friendship, Questionable

Procrastination is something you do yourself. You know: "I gotta sharpen these pencils before I start. I got 20 pencils, they're looking kinda dull." Well, the pencils aren't calling you and alluring you and inviting you and offering you anything. They're just sitting there. You're the one who's procrastinating.

source: - "Michael Chabon’s Vinyl Draft". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. September 2012.

Topics: Procrastination, Offering, Dull

When I first decided I wanted to be a writer, when I was 10, 11 years old, the books that I loved obviously and openly fit that description: They came with maps and glossaries and timelines - books like Lord Of The Rings, Dune, The Chronicles Of Narnia. I imagined that's what being a writer was: You invented a world, and you did it in a very detailed way, and you told stories that were set in that world.

source: - Interview with Elizabeth Benefiel, www.avclub.com. July 5, 2007.

Topics: Book, Years, Stories, Timelines

I hate to see great works of literature ghettoized, whereas others that conform to the rules, conventions, and procedures of the genre we call literary fiction get accorded greater esteem and privilege. I also have a problem with how books are marketed, with certain cover designs and typefaces. They're often stamped with an identity that has nothing to do with their effect on the reader.

source: - Interview with Elizabeth Benefiel, www.avclub.com. July 5, 2007.

Topics: Hate, Book, Design, Typefaces

I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “Wonder Boys”, p.53, Open Road Media

Topics: Mean, Sobriety, Way

Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.

Topics: Steel, Locks, Pairs

The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.

source: - Michael Chabon (2012). “Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son”, p.11, Harper Collins

Topics: Father, Historic, Lows, Being A Father

The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs - snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge - were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, and of sadness for his possessing nothing of the ten million minutes of that black-and-white scallop-edged existence save these few proofs.

source: - "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay". Book by Michael Chabon, September 19, 2000.

Topics: Sadness, Black And White, Two, Scallops

That's a big trunk," James said, as we jammed in the leathery old case that looked so much like the black heart of some leviathan. "It fits a tuba, three suitcases, a dead dog, and a garment bag almost perfectly." "That's just what they used to say in the ads," I said.

source: - "Wonder Boys". Book by Michael Chabon, March 14, 1995.

Topics: Dog, Heart, Black, Dead Dog, Leviathan

It was nice standing out in the darkness, in the damp grass, with spring coming on and a feeling in my heart of imminent disaster.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “Wonder Boys”, p.58, Open Road Media

Topics: Spring, Nice, Heart, Damp

Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him

Topics: Mother, Brother, Father, Internment, Zinc

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.

Topics: Children, Believe, Ambition, Doritos

Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the middle sixties and late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age.

Topics: Powerful, Lying, Flower, Mods, Misogyny

I saw a lot of lousy movies and watched a ton of crappy television and read a bunch of utterly forgettable books and comics and listened to hours of junk music as a kid. And I'm still drawing profitably in my own art on some of the tawdry treasure I stored up in those years.

Topics: Art, Book, Kids, Forgettable

The world like our heads was meant to be escaped from, they are prisons world and head alike.

Topics: World, Were Meant To Be, Prison

I have confused ideas of deity, heavily influenced by mind-altering years of reading science fiction, that do not often trouble me, but one thing I know for certain, and have known since the age of five or six, is that I really can't stand the God of Abraham. In fact, I consider him to constitute the pattern to which every true asshole I have ever known in my life has pretty well conformed.

Topics: Confused, Reading, Years

What smells strongly of crap to one generation - Victorian penny dreadfuls, the music of the Archies, the Lone Ranger radio show, blaxploitation films of the seventies - so often becomes a fruitful source of inspiration, veneration, and study for those to come, while certified Great and Worthy Art molders and fades on its storage rack, giving off an increasingly powerful whiff of naphthalene.

Topics: Art, Powerful, Inspiration, Lone Ranger

There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child's perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innocence children have) is rooted in their trust of you, one that you will shortly be obliged to betray; whether it is fair or not, whether you can help it or not, you are always the ultimate guarantor or destroyer of that innocence.

Topics: Children, Pain, Parenting

Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”, p.32, Open Road Media

Topics: Girl, Drunk, Fool, Lexicon, Dainty

A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos –like amber in which a memory gets trapped.

Topics: Memories, Believe, Feelings, Memento, Keepsakes

Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.

source: - Michael Chabon (2012). “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content): A Novel”, p.325, Random House

Topics: Age, Matter, Golden, Golden Age, Felicity

My heart was simultaneously broken and filled with lust, I was exhausted, and I loved every minute of it. It was strange and elating to find myself for once the weaker.

Topics: Heart, Broken, Lust

That evening I rode downtown on an unaccountably empty bus, sitting in the last row. At the front I saw a thin cloud of smoke rising around the driver’s head. ‘Hey, bus driver,’ I said. ‘Can I smoke?’ ‘May I,’ said the bus driver. ‘I love you,’ I said.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”, p.105, Open Road Media

Topics: Love You, Clouds, Sitting, Bus Driver

See you in the funny papers," he said. Jaunty, he reminded himself; always jaunty. In my panache is their hope for salvation.

source: - Michael Chabon (2012). “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay”, p.19, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Paper, Salvation, Said, Panache

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Topics: Night, Burritos, Ruins

Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat -- was, literally, talked into life.

source: - Michael Chabon (2012). “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content): A Novel”, p.119, Random House

Topics: Rivers, World, Goats, Judah, Delectable

Mr. Feld was right; life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won, and even the best hitters were put out seventy percent of the time.

Topics: Baseball, Loss, Errors

The fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.

source: - Michael Chabon (2003). “Summerland”, Thorndike Pr

Topics: Summer, Baseball, Games

His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.

source: - Michael Chabon (2012). “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay”, p.3, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Dream, Struggle, Light

Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands”, p.147, Open Road Media

Topics: Writing, People, Fiction

The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball," Peavine's book began, "whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When it comes to the position of catcher, as all but fools and shortstops will freely acknowledge, this solemn requirement is doubled.

source: - Michael Chabon (2003). “Summerland”, Thorndike Pr

Topics: Baseball, Book, Games, Shortstops, Firsts And Lasts

[My dad] didn't do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn't take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didn't make the appointments. He didn't shop for my clothes. He didn't make my breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My mom did all of those things, and nobody ever told her when she did them that it made her a good mother.

source: - Michael Chabon (2012). “Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son”, p.17, Harper Collins

Topics: Mom, Mother, Dad, Hair Cut

Entertainment is a sacred pursuit when done well. When done well, it raises the quality of human life.

Topics: Quality, Done, Sacred

But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”, p.213, Open Road Media

Topics: Lying, Heart, Firsts, Trepidation

No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.

Topics: Belief, Ruined, Again And Again

Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself.

Topics: Trying, Failing, Moments

The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness

Topics: House, Emptiness, Melancholy

...Landsman doesn't buy that. Bina never stopped wanting to redeem the world. She just let the world she was trying to redeem get smaller and smaller until at one point, it could be bounded in the hat of a hopeless policeman.

Topics: Trying, Hats, World

When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, 'In everything but sexual preference.

Topics: Fool, Preference, Ifs

It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “Wonder Boys”, p.366, Open Road Media

Topics: Animal, Men, Optimism, Commendable

When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness - and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.

source: - "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh". Book by Michael Chabon, 1988.

Topics: Summer, Stupid, Past, Fanfare, Exaggerated

That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution.

Topics: Writing, Idaho, Ready

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.

source: - Michael Chabon (2012). “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content): A Novel”, p.15, Random House

Topics: Dream, New York, Book, Interviewers, Houdini

There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it.

source: - Michael Chabon (2012). “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content): A Novel”, p.247, Random House

Topics: Museums, Canvas, Bedroom

I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “Wonder Boys”, p.55, Open Road Media

Topics: Morning, Home, Destiny

It drains the bars and cafes after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped Formica counter, and thrums with the gossip of criminals, policemen, shtarkers,and schlemiels, whores and night owls ... three or four floaters, solitaries, and drunks between benders lean against the sparkly resin counter, sucking the tea from their shtekelehs and working the calulations of their next big mistake.

Topics: Mistake, Night, Gossip, After Hours, Big Mistake

I don't care what is written," Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag.

Topics: Son, Cutting, Ideas, Ex Wife, Totes

... But he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “A Model World: And Other Stories”, p.17, Open Road Media

Topics: Mistake, Great Love, Terrible

I thought, I fanced, that in a moment, I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has.

Topics: Wings, Would Be, Firsts

Bina rolls her eyes, hands on her hips, glances at the door. Then she comes over and drops her bag and plops down beside him. How many times, he wonders, can she have enough of him, already, and still have not quite enough?

Topics: Eye, Doors, Hands

A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.

source: - "The Yiddish Policemen's Union". Book by Michael Chabon, 2007.

Topics: Disappointment, Half, Fulfilled

I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

source: - Michael Chabon (2011). “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”, p.48, Open Road Media

Topics: Baseball, Dog, Kids, Kids Playing

. . .I really ought to have recognized it for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there - for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time

Topics: Long, Inspire, Nostalgia

Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve.

source: - "The Yiddish Policemen’s Union". Book by Michael Chabon, 2007.

Topics: Generations, Messiah, Loses

He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn't belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged.

source: - "Wonder Boys". Book by Michael Chabon, 1995.

Topics: Soul, Fugitive, Lurking

I said, “I need to hear something that’s going to save my life.” Re: Selecting songs from a jukebox.

Topics: Song, Jukebox, Needs

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.

source: - Michael Chabon (2012). “Wonder Boys”, p.8, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Character, Together, Four

I’m a man who falls in love so easily, and with such reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer.

source: - Michael Chabon (2012). “Wonder Boys”, p.26, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Falling In Love, Men, Entering

It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.

Topics: Thanksgiving, Party, Fire, Bamboo

I don't do a lot of foisting, because when it comes to books I don't really like to be foisted upon.

source: - "Michael Chabon’s Nonfiction Picks". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. May 11, 2010.

Topics: Book

I might spend 100 pages trying to get to know the world I'm writing about: its contours, who are my main characters, what are their relationships to each other, and just trying to get a sense of what and who this book is about. Usually around that point of 100 pages, I start to feel like I'm lost, I have too much material, it's time to start making some choices. It's typically at that point that I sit down and try to make a formal outline and winnow out what's not working and what I'm most interested in, where the story seems to be going.

source: - Interview with Elizabeth Benefiel, www.avclub.com. July 5, 2007.

Topics: Book, Writing, Character

All the preparation in the world doesn't avail you if you can't make that imaginative leap and put yourself in the position of the characters you've created, to imagine what it's like to be somebody else.

source: - Interview with Elizabeth Benefiel, www.avclub.com. July 5, 2007.

Topics: Character, Preparation, World

I love the internet and it has been incredibly useful and I have made discoveries that have been immeasurably crucial to my work- things I don’t know how I ever would have found out otherwise, that are perfect, just what I need for whatever I’m doing.

source: - "Michael Chabon’s Vinyl Draft". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. September, 2012.

Topics: Writing, Discovery, Perfect

[While writing], I'll go anywhere I find that is quiet, has no internet. I have a big internet problem.

source: - "Michael Chabon’s Vinyl Draft". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. September 2012.

Topics: Writing, Quiet, Problem

When I'm writing solitude feels very good. But when I'm not writing it feels lonely... Having a big family solves that problem.

source: - "Michael Chabon’s Vinyl Draft". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. September, 2012.

Topics: Lonely, Writing, Solitude

I have a good memory for words, and when I come upon a word I don't know, I remember it, or try to - it's almost like a tic.

source: - "Michael Chabon’s Vinyl Draft". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. September 2012.

Topics: Memories, Trying, Remember, Tics

I don't have a problem with many uses of the word genre, just certain ones. I have the most trouble when these labels are used to prevent discussion, to prevent a work from being taken seriously as literature. When we say "genre," we generally mean "something crappy," something that would be sold in an airport.

source: - Interview with Elizabeth Benefiel, www.avclub.com. July 5, 2007.

Topics: Taken, Mean, Airports