Quotes by Michael Chabon

“Its very difficult to fail at pornography”

“It feels a little scary for most writers because when youre writing, youre completely in charge – you can say this book is all mine, its my world. Whether giving over some of that has any monetary value or not, well see.”

“The winning names were not even remotely names I would have chosen or invented.”

“the right not to use the name if it is offensive, mischievous, ill-intentioned or inappropriate.”

“I dont think anything else can be hopeful or accomplished if you have the fear that you will get arrested or prosecuted or censored, ... I saw a cry for help. So it was my goal to try to get writers whose work and whose name would be meaningful to the greatest number of people.”

“It just made sense to apply this on a grander scale. If one of us can raise that much for a nonprofit on his own, what could a dozen or more authors pull in for the First Amendment Project?”

“It was the beginning of youth culture and pandering to youth culture, ... In that, the comic book publishers were definitely pioneers.”

“To some of them it had just been work, ... But some got caught up in the romance of creating comic books.”

“Did I really win? ... I had kind of figured it was not my year. My goodness, this is exciting.”

“I do think his books would reward reading by people who think they dont like fantasy.”

Theres nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.

The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness

Mendel had a remarkable nature as a boy. I’m not talking about miracles. Miracles are a burden for a tzaddik, not the proof of one. Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir. There was something in Mendele. There was a fire.

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. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesnt give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesnt court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.

I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary part of writing fiction but as virtual guarantor, insofar as such a thing is possible, of the power of my work: as a sign that I am on the right track, that I am following the recipe correctly, speaking the proper spells. 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. Telling the truth, when the truth matters most, is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth. The adept handles the rich material, the rank river clay, and diligently intones his alphabetical spells, knowing full well the history of golems: how they break free of their creators, grow to unmanageable size and power, refuse to be controlled. In the same way, the writer shapes his story, flecked like river clay with the grit of experience and rank with the smell of human life, heedless of the danger to himself, eager to show his powers, to celebrate his mastery, to bring into being a little world that, like God’s, is at once terribly imperfect and filled with astonishing life.Originally published in The Washington Post Book World

The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers Melissa, it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. Thats pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, youve done well for yourself. Id like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinsons disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time.I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. Im not totally certain where I stand on the whole soul question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, Im inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. Its just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloon as another bag of sand goes over the side of my basket.

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.

The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands,innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses.

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.

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.