Quotes from Michael Chabon

He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn't belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged.

It's simply the case that as I get older, I seem every day to give a little bit less of a fuck what people think of or say about me.

I don't care what is written, Meyer Landsman says. I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag.

All male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure.

Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.

Entertainment is a sacred pursuit when done well. When done well, it raises the quality of human life.

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

It was nice standing out in the darkness, in the damp grass, with spring coming on and a feeling in my heart of imminent disaster.

Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn't Lasker. This guy-' She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.

I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart.

When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, 'In everything but sexual preference.

There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child's perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innocence children have) is rooted in their trust of you, one that you will shortly be obliged to betray; whether it is fair or not, whether you can help it or not, you are always the ultimate guarantor or destroyer of that innocence.

Jesus Fucking Christ," she says with that flawless hardpan accent of hers. It is an expression that always strikes Landsman as curious, or at least as something that he would pay money to see.

A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.

A story begins with this nebulous feeling that's hard to get a hold of and you're testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos—like amber in which a memory gets trapped.

There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not "decorate" it; she infused it.

The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart.

His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.

He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel. "Just watch me," he said.

And that was when you realized the fire was inside you all the time. And that was the miracle. Just that.

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 steelworkers and the Bessemer convertor of love.

It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world.

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