Michael Chabon Quotes

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

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

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.

Childhood is a branch of cartography.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

. . .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

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.

A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.

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.

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

Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve.

[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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.

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.

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

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

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

I agreed to keep the cards a secret and asked my grandmother if she believed in magic. She said she did not but that, surprisingly, magic worked even if you did not believe in it.

I said that I had heard curiosity could be harmful, in particular to cats

People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to l

I was conscious, then, of a different ache, deeper and more sharp than the feeling of bereavement that a hangover will sometimes uncover in the heart.

Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children's understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make.The Killer Hook

… remembered summer light, and the luminous inverted ghost of a boy with a parrot on his shoulder.

In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you.

For the first time in a very many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world's beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight.

A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.

It takes a sour woman to make a good pickle.

A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, in the bottom of Flowers's face.

It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him.

He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989.