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Michael Chabon
66 quotes
“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 (born 1963) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Recipe for Life, The Washington Book World (2000)
“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 (born 1963) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Maps and Legends, Architectural Digest (April 2001)
“The presence of evil, once scented, tends to bring out all that is most irrational and uncontrollable in the public imagination. It is a catalyst for pea-brained theories, gimcrack scholarship, and the credulous cosmologies of hysteria.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The God of Dark Laughter, The New Yorker (April 9, 2001)
“When I first set my sights on becoming a writer at age eleven or so, I wanted to be a fantasy and science fiction writer. That was my preferred reading material and that's what I thought I was going to write. That's always been there. You can even see little hints of it in Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonderboys.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Metro Weekly, March 12, 2002
“I think it was when I got to the butterflies -- in that brief, beautiful image comprising life, death and technology -- that the hair on the back of my neck began to stand on end. All at once, the pleasure I took in reading was altered irrevocably. Before then I had never noticed, somehow, that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot but of language. And not merely of pretty words and neat turns of phrase, but of systems of imagery, strategies of metaphor.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Close Encounters, Washington Post (April 7, 2002)
“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 (born 1963) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Woman of Valor, Alure (May 2004)
“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 (born 1963) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction to McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (2004)
“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 (born 1963) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Secret Skin (March 10, 2008)
“The Weinreichs have laid out, with numerical precision, the outlines of a world, of a fantastic land in which it would behoove you to know how to say, in Yiddish, 250. What is the flight number? 1372. I need something for a tourniquet. 1379. Here is my identification. 254. Can I go by boat/ferry to----?”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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 (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Eight solid light-years of lead...is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos. I guess the little fuckers are everywhere.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The young men listen dutifully, for the most part, and from time to time some of them even take the trouble to go over to the college library, and dig up one or another of his novels, and crouch there, among the stacks, flipping impatiently through the pages, looking for parts that sound true.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If Miss Sloviak were not already a transvestite, Crabtree would certainly make her into one.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Over the years I'd surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs, but marijuana and I remained steadfast companions. I had one fragrant ounce of Humboldt County, California, in a Ziploc bag in the glove compartment of my car.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had a certain cetacean delicacy of movement in the wide open sea of a hundred-yard field...”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dutifully I thumbed the rides, hopped the B & Os and the Great Northerns, balled the lithe small-town girls in the band shells of their hometown parks, held the job as field hand and day laborer and soda jerk, saw the crude spectacles of American landscape slide past me as I lay in an open boxcar and drank cheap red wine; and if I didn't, I might as well have.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rockings of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A couple of years later I would marry her for a little while.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a lifelong habit of marijuana I was used to having even the most dreadful phenomena prove, on further inspection, to be only the figments of my paranoid fancy...”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel great," I said, trying to decide how I did feel.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm a man who falls in love so easily, and with such a 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.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...as with most redheaded women what beauty she possessed was protean and odd.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every writer has an ideal reader, I thought, and it was just my good luck that mine wanted to sleep with me.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The overcoat was a trademark of his. It was an impermeable thrift-shop special with a plaid flannel lining and wide lapels, and it looked as though it had been trying for many years to keep the rain off the stooped shoulders of a long series of hard cases, drifters, and ordinary bums. It emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Her style was plain and poetic as rain on a daisy--she was particularly gifted at the description of empty land and horses. She lived in the basement of my house for a hundred dollars a month, and I was desperately in love with her.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Her ankles were wobbling in her tall black pumps, and I saw that it could not be an easy thing to be a drunken transvestite.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The whiskey tasted like bear steaks and river mud and the flesh of an oak tree. I had another swallow because it tasted so good.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I found myself going over a particular troublesome scene in the novel, for the one thousand and seventy-third time, in the manner of a lunatic ape in a cage at the zoo, running his fingers back and forth along the iron bars of his home.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although it was only nine o'clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he'd strapped himself for the evening, stolen a tuba, and offended a transvestite; and now his companions were beginning, with delight and aplomb, to barf. It was definitely a Crabtree kind of night.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Forget about what you are escaping from," he said, quoting an old maxim of Kornblum's. "Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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 (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]f neuroses were swimming pools one might, like Cheever's swimmer, steer a course from my house to the city limits and never touch dry land.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When Berkeley does not feel like some kind of vast exercise in collective dystopia—a kind of left-wing Plymouth Plantation in which a man may be pilloried for over-illuminating his house at Christmastime—then paradoxically it often feels like a place filled with people incapable of feeling or acting in concert with each other.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Are you mocking the concept?” “Not necessary,” Berko says. “The concept mocks itself.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The daily sight of her is going to be a torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A friendship across sectarian lines is not a common phenomenon, in his experience. In the past, it has struck him that, apart from homosexuals, only chess players have found a reliable way to bridge, intensely but without fatal violence, the gulf that separates any given pair of men.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men tend to cry, in Landsman's experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along just, under their boot, lay the abyss. This is part of the policeman's job, to jerk back the pretty carpet that covers over the deep jagged hole in the floor.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He knows, of course, that a criminal organization like the Verbover ring can’t flourish without the ready services of bagman and secret lobbyists, without regular applications of grease and body English to the works of government.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He’s too superstitious not to see this as a bad omen, but when you're a pessimist, all omens are bad.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He doesn’t know how one proceeds under the circumstances, except with the certainty, pressed to the heart like a keepsake of love, that in the end nothing really matters.”
Michael Chabon (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source