Top 200 Michael Chabon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “With patience and calm, persistence and stoicism, good handwriting and careful labeling, they would meet persecution, indignity, and hardship head-on.”

— Michael Chabon

2. “Childhood is a branch of cartography.”

— Michael Chabon

3. “Do what you gotta do and stay fly.”

— Michael Chabon

4. “My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.”

— Michael Chabon

5. “Zugzwang. It’s when you have no good moves. But you still have to move.”

— Michael Chabon

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

— Michael Chabon

7. “I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.”

— Michael Chabon

8. “Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.”

— Michael Chabon

9. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

10. “The fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.”

— Michael Chabon

11. “Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve.”

— Michael Chabon

12. “A father is a man who fails every day.”

— Michael Chabon

13. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

14. “All the preparation in the world doesn’t avail you if you can’t make that imaginative leap and put yourself in the position of the characters you’ve created, to imagine what it’s like to be somebody else.”

— Michael Chabon

15. “Nothing is boring exept to people who aren’t really paying attention.”

— Michael Chabon

16. “You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.”

— Michael Chabon

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

— Michael Chabon

18. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

19. “The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness.”

— Michael Chabon

20. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

21. “I can imagine anything except having no imagination.”

— Michael Chabon

22. “A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.”

— Michael Chabon

23. “Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs.”

— Michael Chabon

24. “A true storyteller is really good at writing himself into a corner and then finding a way out of that corner.”

— Michael Chabon

25. “There’s nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.”

— Michael Chabon

26. “Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.”

— Michael Chabon

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

— Michael Chabon

28. “Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.”

— Michael Chabon

29. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

30. “Mr. Feld was right; life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won, and even the best hitters were put out seventy percent of the time.”

— Michael Chabon

31. “It’s always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.”

— Michael Chabon

32. “Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted-not taught-to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?”

— Michael Chabon

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

— Michael Chabon

34. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

35. “That evening I rode downtown on an unaccountably empty bus, sitting in the last row. At the front I saw a thin cloud of smoke rising around the driver’s head. ‘Hey, bus driver,’ I said. ‘Can I smoke?’ ‘May I,’ said the bus driver. ‘I love you,’ I said.”

— Michael Chabon

36. “We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place...”

— Michael Chabon

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

— Michael Chabon

38. “Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.”

— Michael Chabon

39. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

40. “Kornblum was, nevertheless, unable to resist offering that final criticism to his erstwhile pupil on his performance that night. “Never worry about what you are escaping from,” he said. “Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to.”

— Michael Chabon

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

— Michael Chabon

42. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

43. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

44. “But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave.”

— Michael Chabon

45. “Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell’s stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.”

— Michael Chabon

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

46. “I thought, I fanced, that in a moment, I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has.”

— Michael Chabon

47. “That’s why baseball is more like life than other games. Sometimes I feel like that’s all I do in life, keep track of my errors.”

— Michael Chabon

48. “Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance.”

— Michael Chabon

49. “All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”

— Michael Chabon

50. “Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure, in the truest sense of that overtaxed word: a setting forth into trackless lands that might have come to existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them.”

— Michael Chabon