“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 , book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind o…" by Michael Chabon?
Michael Chabon photo
Michael Chabon 96
Novelist, short story writer, essayist 1963

Related quotes

Melissa Lee photo

“This happens…people coming in from South Auckland get to Mount Albert right?…and the thing it's like, hopefully, we could divert some of that traffic and criminals away from Mount Albert…”

Melissa Lee (1966) New Zealand politician

Lee steps into another controversy, Newstalk ZB and New Zealand Press Association, Television New Zealand, 14 May 2010, 2010-07-13 http://tvnz.co.nz/politics-news/lee-steps-into-another-controversy-2735404/video,
About the State Highway 20 Waterview Connection proposal
Mount Albert by-election campaign, 2009

Craig Ferguson photo

“Whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn't matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover.”

Craig Ferguson (1962) Scottish-born American television host, stand-up comedian, writer, actor, director, author, producer and voice a…

Source: American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot

Elizabeth Hand photo

“I don't think all artists are mad, but there is statistical medical evidence that a lot of creative people suffer from various mood disorders.”

Elizabeth Hand (1957) American writer

Strange Horizons interview (2004)
Context: I don't think all artists are mad, but there is statistical medical evidence that a lot of creative people suffer from various mood disorders. They fall somewhere on the spectrum of being bipolar, of being borderline autistic and so on. These things are there. Now of course these days you can go to college and when you come out you are a professional artist and you can run a gallery as a business and have a career. That is a very valid way for an artist to make a living. But it doesn't make for a very interesting story. It doesn't have a lot of mythic subtext. … For me a lot of the world really is like that. The scenes in my book that people describe as "such a hallucinatory sequence" … I don't see the world like that all the time, but I see the world like that a lot.
So what am I going to do about that? Am I going to go crazy? Am I going to institutionalize myself? Am I going to go and work in a cubicle as a telemarketer so that I don't give vent to that? Or am I going to take that and channel it into my work? It is a gift.

Aristotle photo

“For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe. And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders); therefore since they philosophized order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.”

Aristotle book Metaphysics

Metaphysics by Aristotle – Book 1, ClassicalWisdom.com
The second sentence is in Metaphysics A 2, 928<sup>b</sup> 17&ndash;20, Aristotle: Metaphysics Beta: Symposium Aristotelicum, Michel Crubellier & Andre´ Laks, eds. (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 4.
Metaphysics
Variant: [And] one who experiences a difficulty and who feels wonder thinks that he does not understand..., so that, if it is to escape ignorance that they have practised philosophy, then it is clearly for the sake of knowing, and not for any practical purpose, that they have pursued understanding.

“Apparently many people were horrified by what I had wrote, so much so that parents from the alumni, students from the cohort and people from my class all forwarded the post to the principal, demanding that he did something about it. But he didn’t, and he couldn’t, sucks for them.”

Amos Yee (1998) blogger

Tumblr postings

“Oh, here’s a clever one. Do you remember this question from the first test? It reads, ‘What’s wrong with this statement?’ And do you know what Constance wrote in reply? She wrote, ‘What’s wrong with you?”

Trenton Lee Stewart The Mysterious Benedict Society

Source: The Mysterious Benedict Society

Michael Greger photo

“People with a family history of disease often throw up their hands: ‘I've got bad genes.’ No, these are the people who have to eat exquisitely healthy. Bad diets often run in families. You eat how you were taught to eat. For most Americans, that's not good news. But we can regain our health—by eating the plant-based diets of populations that don't suffer from these diseases.”

Michael Greger (1972) American physician, author, and vegan health activist

Interview in the book What the Health https://books.google.it/books?id=FIY8DgAAQBAJ&pg=PT0 by Eunice Wong (Xlibris, 2017), ch. 1.

Chiaki Mukai photo

“My dream when I was a child was to be a medical doctor so that I could help people suffering from diseases.”

Chiaki Mukai (1952) astronaut, medical doctor
Thomas Mann photo

“I think of my suffering, of the problem of my suffering. What am I suffering from? From knowledge — is it going to destroy me? What am I suffering from? From sexuality — is it going to destroy me?”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Letter from Naples, Italy to Otto Grautoff (1896); as quoted in A Gorgon's Mask: The Mother in Thomas Mann's Fiction (2005) by Lewis A. Lawson, p. 34
Context: I think of my suffering, of the problem of my suffering. What am I suffering from? From knowledge — is it going to destroy me? What am I suffering from? From sexuality — is it going to destroy me? How I hate it, this knowledge which forces even art to join it! How I hate it, this sensuality, which claims everything fine and good is its consequence and effect. Alas, it is the poison that lurks in everything fine and good! — How am I to free myself of knowledge? By religion? How am I to free myself of sexuality? By eating rice?

Related topics