Michael Chabon Quotes

91 Sourced Quotes

I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Michael Chabon
If 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
If Miss Sloviak were not already a transvestite, Crabtree would certainly make her into one.

Michael Chabon
He's too superstitious not to see this as a bad omen, but when you're a pessimist, all omens are bad.

Michael Chabon
"I feel great," I said, trying to decide how I did feel.

Michael Chabon
Not only would I never want to belong to any club that would have me for a member—if elected I would wear street shoes onto the squash court and set fire to the ballroom curtains.

Michael Chabon
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
Art... asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.

Michael Chabon
But he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.

Michael Chabon
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
Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing.

Michael Chabon
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
Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city — in every cranium — in the world.

Michael Chabon
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
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
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.

Michael Chabon
It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology.

Michael Chabon
Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture.

Michael Chabon
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