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Michael Chabon Quotes
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Michael Chabon is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist and short story writer.Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh , was published when he was 25. He followed it with Wonder Boys , and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that John Leonard, in a 2007 review of a later novel, called Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001.

His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of that same year. In 2012 Chabon published Telegraph Avenue, billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch," concerning the tangled lives of two families in the Bay Area of San Francisco in the year 2004. Chabon followed Telegraph Avenue in November 2016 with his latest novel, Moonglow, a fictionalized memoir of his maternal grandfather, based upon his deathbed confessions under the influence of powerful painkillers in Chabon's mother's California home in 1989.

Chabon's work is characterized by complex language, the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes, including nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since the late 1990s, Chabon has written in an increasingly diverse series of styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, he has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials. Wikipedia  

✵ 24. May 1963   •   Other names مایکل شیبن
Michael Chabon photo
Michael Chabon: 96   quotes 1   like

Michael Chabon Quotes

“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 book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Love , Horse , Housing

“The imagination of teenagers is often -- I'm tempted to say always -- the only sure capital they possess apart from the love of their parents, which is a force far beyond their capacity to comprehend or control.During my own adolescence, my imagination, the kingdom inside my own skull, was my sole source of refuge, my fortress of solitude, at times my prison. Like all teenagers, I provisioned my garrison with art: books, movies, music, comic books, television, role-playing games. Given their nature as human creations, as artifacts and devices of human nature, some of the provisions I consumed were bound to be of a dark, violent, even bloody and horrifying nature; otherwise I would not have cared for them.”

Michael Chabon

Nanny Nation http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/04/15/EDG8D64JFR1.DTL, San Francisco Chronicle (April 15, 2004)

Love , Books , Art , Music

“"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 book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Part I, ch. 1
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)

Personality

“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 book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

“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

Interview with Metro Weekly, March 12, 2002

Age , Science , Reading

“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

Maps and Legends http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol42/no2/p35.htm, Architectural Digest (April 2001)

Sense , Childhood

“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 book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Home , Time

“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

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 23

Love , Heart

“A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.”

Michael Chabon

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 39

Hope , Disappointment

“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 book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Cars , Marijuana

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

Michael Chabon

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 23

“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

Secret Skin http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/10/080310fa_fact_chabon (March 10, 2008)

Feeling , Sun , Heart , Flying

“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

A Woman of Valor, Alure (May 2004)

Disappointment

“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 book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Men , Time , Parting

“[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

Greasy Kids’ Stuff

Pleasure

“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

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 1

Alcohol , Way , Mathematics , Passion

“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

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 9

Life , God

“We don't want teenagers to write violent poems, horrifying stories, explicit lyrics and rhymes; they're ugly, in precisely the way that we are ugly, and out of protectiveness and hypocrisy, even out of pity and love and tenderness, we try to force young people to be innocent of everything but the effects of that ugliness.So we censor the art they consume and produce, and prosecute and suspend and expel them, and when, once in a great while, a teenager reaches for an easy gun and shoots somebody or himself, we tell ourselves that if we had only censored his journals and curtailed his music and video games, that awful burst of final ugliness could surely have been prevented. As if art caused the ugliness, when of course all it can ever do is reflect and, perhaps, attempt to explain it.Let teenagers languish, therefore, in their sense of isolation, without outlet or nourishment, bereft of the only thing that makes it all bearable: knowing that somebody else has felt the way that you feel, has faced it, run from it, rued it, lamented it and transformed it into art; has been there, and returned, and lived, for the only good reason we have: to tell the tale.How confident we shall be, once we have done this, of never encountering the ugliness again! How happy our children will be, and how brave, and how safe!”

Michael Chabon

Nanny Nation

Love , Children , People , Art

“I had a certain cetacean delicacy of movement in the wide open sea of a hundred-yard field…”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Sea

“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.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Women , Men , Children , Secret

“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 book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Marijuana

“Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength.”

Michael Chabon

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 39

Men

“Yes, all right, Landsman understands, so go shit in the ocean, that he made not the right but the only choice. He understands that the necessity of covering up for the dark deeds of the boys in the top drawer is one that nozzes have been making into a virtue since the dawn of police work.”

Michael Chabon

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 45

Making love , Boy , Understanding

“Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.”

Michael Chabon

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 23