Michael Chabon Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

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.

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

The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness

A father is a man who fails every day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[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.

Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve.

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

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.

A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.

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.