Michael Chabon Quotes

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.

 

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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