Quotes by Michael Chabon

[His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.

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

As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didnt intend to keep.

The day you ever have that much control over my behavior, it will be because somebodys asking you, should she get the pine box or a plain white shroud?

He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like How sane are we? and Do our lives have meaning? The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.

As soon as I read that, it clicked: thats my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place.

Louis Pasteur said, Chance favors the prepared mind. If youre really engaged in the writing, youll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in.

When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write.

“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.”

“You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling you to do, perform, or say anything at all.”