Michael Chabon Quotes

But then, staring at the label on one crate, which readSWORD-CANE-DLUBECK SHOE TREE-HORASUITS (3)-HO...

The baby, not too young to start knowing the ledge, the cold truth, the life-and-death facts of it a...

Love great first lines and paragraphs. From The Yiddish Policemen's Union:Nine months Landsman's bee...

I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevi...

All of the dissatisfactions he had felt in his practice of the art form he had stumbled across withi...

… remembered summer light, and the luminous inverted ghost of a boy with a parrot on his shoulder.

It drains the bars and cafes after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped F...

In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you.

His body had almost no hair and his naked little circumcised johnson was nearly as pale as the rest ...

this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing

The winter drove them mad. It drove every man mad who had ever lived through it; there was only ever...

The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness

When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so t...

For the first time in a very many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasu...

As soon as I read that, it clicked: that's my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could ...

Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children's understanding of the...

A father is a man who fails every day.

The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my...

Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'...

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is th...

Badass.'" My grandfather sampled the flavor of the word. It did not seem to revolt him, but it was n...

A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feeli...

It takes a sour woman to make a good pickle.

Landsman and Bina were married to each other for twelve years and together for five before that. Eac...

I was afraid that I had made a profound, irrevocable mistake, and that, as in a fantastic tale, if I...

[A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are ...

People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to l

{...} I was okay with things the way they were. No, not okay: I longed and suffered and pined with t...

[My dad] didn't do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn't take me to get my hai...

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our...

There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child's perf...

One of the fundamental axioms of masculine self-regard is that the tools and appurtenances of a man'...

Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destructi...

All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction....Through parody and pastic...

But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina. The land that h...

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

Anyway, it's a pretty good story," I said. "You have to admit.""Yeah?" He crumpled up the Kleenex, h...

I'm disappointed in myself. In my life. All my life, everything I tried, I only got halfway there. Y...

I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their live...

I agreed to keep the cards a secret and asked my grandmother if she believed in magic. She said she ...

My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother's illness, but when it came to the...

The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bo...

I said that I had heard curiosity could be harmful, in particular to cats

A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, in the bottom of Flowers's face.

He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or p...

It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him.

There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was ...

Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, f...

All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster wei...

As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned ou...

There is only one sure means in life," Deasey said, "of ensuring that you are not ground into paste ...

The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what...

He could not shake the feeling - reportedly common among ghosts - that it was not he but those he ha...

Airplane Dream #13' told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world...

He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are ...

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

Finally I reached into my pocket and flipped a quarter. Heads was Phlox, tails was Arthur. It came u...

I was conscious, then, of a different ache, deeper and more sharp than the feeling of bereavement th...

This song always kills me, I said. She sighed, and then gave up. Why? Oh, I don't know. It makes me ...

Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to ...

The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk the streets quickly, eyes averted from...

I don't care what is written," Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to so...

Mendel had a remarkable nature as a boy. I’m not talking about miracles. Miracles are a burden for a...

Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn't Lasker. This guy-'She puts a hand to his mo...

He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When the...

A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a go...

It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the stat...

The day you ever have that much control over my behavior, it will be because somebody's asking you, ...

From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine...

I HAD known him as a bulldozer, as a samurai, as an android programmed to kill, as Plastic Man and T...

Although sex was something they both regarded as perilous, marriage had, by contrast, seemed safe– a...

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

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

[His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel ...

The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and mis...

Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actu...

Although it wasn't raining anymore, the air was still heavy with water, and rain gutters were ringin...

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