Quotes from Michael Chabon

His body had almost no hair and his naked little circumcised johnson was nearly as pale as the rest of him, white as a boy's - perhaps over time one's genitals emerge from the pots and bubbling vats of love permanently stained, like the hands of a wool dyer.

Just to spite himself, because spiting himself, spiting others, spiting the world is the pastime and only patrimony of Landsman and his people.

We can't take pleasure in a work of art, not in good conscience, without accepting the implicit intention of the artist to please us.

Literary talent is an accident of birth, like the ability to spot four-leaf clovers, and about as meaningful in the absence of hard work.

It was like using a rake to whip egg whites, a dagger to pick your teeth. It could be done, but to do so was a perversion. Furthermore, ineffective.

He ordered a slice of the house's excellent Sacher torte and a cup of coffee that was unusually drinkable for New York, and waited.

bullshit sniffer set as ever to a brutally low ppm.

Comic books actually are inferior," Sammy said. "I really do believe that. It's—it's just built in to the material. We're talking about a bunch of guys—and a girl—who run around in their long johns punching people, all right?

the way a drop of blue paint intensified whiteness.

He told himself he would move faster and smarter alone, but the truth was that he was grieving for Aughenbaugh, and like a lot of grieving people who keep a habitual distance from their emotions, he thought that being alone was what he needed.

There's a fool of a devil in him that wants to feel the thrum of current. There's a current in him that wants to feel the devil in the wire.

And there were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworks and the Bessemer converter of love.

He's making an attempt to look at his ease, but some men just don't know how to stand around with their hands in their pockets and look natural.

He didn't say anything. He lay there with his eyes closed for a long time after that, sculling along the surface of the sea of pain a little nearer to his story's end or maybe, if that great eschatologist Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun turned out to be right, toward story on the opposite shore that was waiting to begin.

It's the kind of house you'd like to wake up in on Christmas morning.

and like a lot of grieving people who keep a habitual distance from their emotions, he thought that being alone was what he needed.

We're just animals in a cage. They're just feeding us to keep us alive.

The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed

I wasn't unkind to him. I just didn't talk to him. I didn't talk to anybody, and I didn't want anybody talking to me. That was the plan.

open the door in the gate. She had always found a paradox in the crime of blasphemy for it seemed to her that any God who could be discountenanced by the words of human beings was by definition not worthy of reverence, but

I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the clichés and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the clichés and conventions of the young.

A few peace activists, looking like peace activists all over the world, young, unassailable, and romantic, hand out roses. The message is old, the gesture likewise: the flower as a sign of good. There's a flaw in the symbolism, however, a permanent gash in this goodness: the flower withers. It lives for a moment. Then it withers in your hands.

Although it was only nine o'clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he'd strapped himself for the evening, stolen a tuba, and offended a transvestite; and now his companions were beginning, with delight and aplomb, to barf. It was definitely a Crabtree kind of night.

They wring their hands, should I do this, should I do that. They get seventeen different opinions. Then they do what they planned to do all along. If you give advice, they only blame you when it turns out bad.