Quotes from Michael Chabon

Rosa's brush caught the rime of ash on his lapel, the missed button of his waistcoat, the tender, impatient, defiant expression in his eyes by means of which he is clearly trying to convey to the artist, telepathically, that he intends, in an hour or so, to f*ck her.

There is only one sure means in life, Deasey said, of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusion. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money.

Entertainment has a bad name...The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights.

She was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out through the crack. When

Naomi was a tough kid, so much tougher than Landsman ever needed to be. She was two years younger, close enough for everything Landsman did or said to constitute a mark that must be surpassed or a theory to disprove. She was boyish as a girl and mannish as a woman. When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, "In everything but sexual preference.

Shprintzl Rudashevsky's wide face takes on a philosophical, even mystic, blankness. She looks like she's wetting her pants and enjoying the warmth.

Most of the questions people asked you, he felt, were there to fill up dead space, curtail your movements, divert your energy and attention. Anyway, my grandfather and his emotions were never really on speaking terms.

He had already seized this particular day once, but he was prepared, if need be, to go ahead and seize the motherfucker all over again.

Yet entertainment--as I define it, pleasure and all--remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody else. The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience, and the universal hunger for connection.

I thought you seemed like someone who might enjoy backgammon, said the kid, gravely mistaken.

He nodded then cocked his head and gave me a sharp, policeman like look, as though realizing that he had been on the wrong page with me all along. I fell under the heading of Dealing with Assholes.

He took a step toward her, than another, tentatively, gathering all his strength, as though about to throw a heavy switch that would, if his calculations were correct, bring light to a hundred cities and ten thousand darkened rooms. He was going to ask her to dance - that was all.

The confirmed stick-in-the-mud will always fall victim to the interventions of other people acting on impulse, because if habit is his religion, then his Satan is change, and in the end, we are all prey to temptation.

I like the way she dances. She shows a heavy Pharaonic influence, I'd say, in the elbows. With perhaps just a soupçon of Snoopy in the feet.

Over the years I'd surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs, but marijuana and I remained steadfast companions.

I don't save lives," Zelikman said. "I just prolong their futility.

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 agreed to keep the cards a secret and asked my grandmother if she believed in magic. She said she did not but that, surprisingly, magic worked even if you did not believe in it.

Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map -marked HERE THERE BE TYGERS and MEAN KID WITH AIR RIFLE-that he or she has been able to construct out of patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighbourhood children.

When I read these words I saw at once a connection to my own work. Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

Mendel had a remarkable nature as a boy. I'm not talking about miracles. Miracles are a burden for a tzaddik, not the proof of one. Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir. There was something in Mendele. There was a fire.

Crabtree's father was a Pentecostalist preacher somewhere out in Hogscrotum County, MO, and his mother was the editor-in-chief of a magazine for knitting-machine enthusiasts. 'She can make you anything,' went a favorite line of his. 'She made me a queer.' He had been lost to the clutch of Satan since early adolescence and hadn't seen them in years.

The lucky ones are the people like your husband there. The ones who find work that means something to them. That they can really put their heart into, however foolish it might look to other people.

My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There