Michael Chabon Quotes
-
[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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.
→ -
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.
→ -
The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart.
→ -
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.
→ -
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?
→ -
Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself.
→ -
I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.
→ -
The instructor, Ms. Pease, also taught in the church's religious school, and she had a Sunday school manner at once saccharine and condemnatory.
→ -
I can imagine anything except having no imagination.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.
→ -
Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!
→ -
There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.
→ -
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.
→ -
I don't do a lot of foisting, because when it comes to books I don't really like to be foisted upon.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Zadie Smith Novelist -
Andrew Stanton Film director -
Philip Roth Novelist -
Don DeLillo Writer -
Miles Millar Screenwriter -
Matt Fraction Comic Book Writer -
Jonathan Franzen Novelist -
Dave Eggers Writer -
Paul Auster Author -
Tom Wolfe Author -
Neil Gaiman Author -
Ayelet Waldman Novelist -
Jonathan Lethem Novelist -
John Irving Novelist -
David Mitchell Novelist -
David Foster Wallace Novelist -
Junot Diaz Writer -
John Cheever Novelist -
Jeffrey Eugenides Novelist -
Thomas Pynchon Novelist