Quotes from Michael Chabon

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

Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.

I abandoned my second novel completely. Writing 'Kavalier & Clay,' I had several moments of utter collapse. Same with 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.'

I have a good memory for words, and when I come upon a word I don't know, I remember it, or try to - it's almost like a tic. I also just have a good feeling for how words are made and formed in English and the etymologies that give you prefixes and suffixes.

God, I just love 'A Journey to the End of the Millennium,' by A. B. Yehoshua. My favorite novel by an American Jew is probably 'Humboldt's Gift.'

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

In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you.

Ideas are the easy part. I spend a lot of time batting them away, trying to keep them from distracting me from what I actually have to focus on and finish. A lot of times, they are a siren temptress beckoning me with the promise of a much shorter, simpler, more slender novel over the horizon, but of course that's very dangerous.

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.

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

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.

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.

That was all very nice of them. They didn't have to do anything because I wasn't officially involved at all.

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.

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

I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, a planned community built during the sixties. During the early years, it was very integrated. I grew up being taught by black teachers with black principals and vice principals and, you know, a lot of black friends. We played in mixed groups, and I kind of thought that was how it was.

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.

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.

There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.

Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.

In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time.

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 in the first place.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.