Michael Chabon Quotes

He comes to this other world and he has to reinvent himself. Again, it felt natural, even though I`d been working really hard trying to come up with something.

It`s good to have it over with. I worked on it a long time, and I didn`t know what people were going to think of it. Would people like it? Would they buy it? So far it`s been doing pretty well.

I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.

Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story.

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

I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.

Joe is the hero and Sammy is the sidekick. That`s how I feel about it.

I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.

It was an incredible resource. I`d sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the `Talk of the Town` sections.

Moby Dick - that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed; that`s how my book begins, too, but I hadn`t noticed the parallel before, two characters forced to share a bed, reluctantly.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It`s a devastating novel.

That`s the best thing about writing, when you`re in that zone, you`re porous, ready to absorb the solution.

It is unusual for Joe to be that way, but that`s what interested me.

I was surprised that my wife thought it was a good idea, then again with my agent, another woman, then my editor, another woman - in spite of the fact that all three of them reacted positively I still have this fear.

The `Talk of the Town` was really that in the 1940s: it was all about New York, it was only about New York, and it was about people.

Every time another review comes out I let out a deep breath.

What`s going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I`ll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it.

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

I wasn`t involved, except to the degree that they sent me drafts of the script as the writer turned them in. They asked me at one point to write a memo about what I thought of it.

I`m such a devoted web user, myself, that it feels important to me to have a presence, to be a part of that whole collective enterprise.

So it was scary, but that`s how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong.

Having chosen to set the book during this period, from the first day I was writing, I knew I was going to have to do something about World War Two.

I completely lost interest in comics. I sold my collection. I didn`t go back to them for fifteen years - until after Wonder Boys.

I have a deadline. I`m glad. I think that will help me get it done.

I was a big comics reader when I was a kid, from about six to fifteen. I collected them, I read them, I even created my own characters in comics.

People keep saying, `Oh, you`re getting all these great reviews, that must make you really happy.` I guess it does, but mostly it`s just a relief.

That was all very nice of them. They didn`t have to do anything because I wasn`t officially involved at all.

It was fun. That was something I came to fairly late.

I like giving readers an opportunity to get a hold of me in that way and to read things I`ve written which might disappear otherwise.

It`s very difficult to fail at pornography