Top 200 Michael Chabon Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “There is one sure means in life of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility and disillusionment. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money.”

— Michael Chabon

152. “I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.”

— Michael Chabon

153. “She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.”

— Michael Chabon

154. “He looked like a man dangerously addicted to the correction of mistaken people.”

— Michael Chabon

155. “At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.”

— Michael Chabon

156. “My grandfather was troubled and fascinated by this alteration from the girl of ten days before. Had the flirtatious gamine in the Ingrid Bergman sunglasses been a pose adopted for the evening, while this shapely vessel leaking sadness approximated something closer to the truth of herself? Or was it the other way around? Maybe neither version was the “truth.” Maybe “self” was a free variable with no bounded value. Maybe very time you met her, she would be somebody else.”

— Michael Chabon

157. “He understood we were there because we were afraid he might die when no one was in the room. He had promised us that he would cling to life, in spite of pain and all cancers primary and secondary, until at last, one day, the doorbell would ring, somebody would have gone to the toilet, and we would be forced in spite of our precautions to leave him unattended. Then, and only then, would he permit himself to die.”

— Michael Chabon

158. “He comes to this other world and he has to reinvent himself. Again, it felt natural, even though I’d been working really hard trying to come up with something.”

— Michael Chabon

159. “Sometimes I fear to write, even in fictional form, about things that really happened to me, about things that I really did, or about the numerous unattractive, cruel, or embarrassing thoughts that I have at one time or another entertained. Just as often, I find myself writing about disturbing or socially questionable acts and states of mind that have no real basis in my life at all, but which, I am afraid, people will quite naturally attribute to me when they read what I have written.”

— Michael Chabon

160. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

161. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

162. “The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk the streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within me but always on the tip of my tongue.”

— Michael Chabon

163. “And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared.”

— Michael Chabon

164. “Usually, you could rely on Americans to believe the worst about their heroes, but nobody wanted to hear that America’s ascent to the Moon had been made with a ladder of bones.”

— Michael Chabon

165. “You were right once, young man,” Anapol said. “That may be all the being right you get.”

— Michael Chabon

166. “His bit of pencil turned up in the seat pocket of his short trousers, but as the search for the pad continued without issue a crease appeared in the boy’s domed brow. He patted himself up and down until filaments of honey floss formed between his fingertips and pockets, coating him in a gossamer down. The old man watched helpless as the boy, with mounting agitation, spun threads of loss from his palms and fingertips.”

— Michael Chabon

167. “I saw that I could write ten thousand more pages of shimmering prose and still be nothing but a blind minotaur stumbling along broken ground, an unsuccessful, overweight ex-wonder boy with a pot habit and a dead dog in the trunk of my car.”

— Michael Chabon

168. “It took Marvel Comics years to begin to put together any worthwhile superheroines. The first crop was, to a gal, embarrassingly disappointing. They had all the measly powers that fifties and sixties male chauvinism could contrive to bestow on a superwoman.”

— Michael Chabon

169. “Books were hungry things, and if you stayed too long in any one place, they would consume everything and everyone around you.”

— Michael Chabon

170. “As they went out of the room Rosa turned to look at Tommy and had an impulse to go back, to get into bed with him and just lie there for a while feeling that deep longing, that sense of missing him desperately, that came over her whenever she held him sleeping in her arms.”

— Michael Chabon

171. “She is getting old, and he is getting old, right on schedule, and yet as time ruins them, they are not, strangely enough, married to each other.”

— Michael Chabon

172. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

173. “When it works, what you get is not a collection of references, quotes, allusions, and cribs but a whole, seamless thing, both familiar and new: a record of the consciousness that was busy falling in love with those moments in the first place.”

— Michael Chabon

174. “A laboring woman, though, while she endured her labor, lay at the center of something truly radiant in four dimensions; every birth everywhere, all the vectors of human evolution and migration originating and terminating at the parting of her legs.”

— Michael Chabon

175. “I don’t look stoned?” My heart began to pound. The classic aim of a pothead is always to look perfectly straight – and if possible operate complicated machinery – while immense shrieking nebulae are coming asunder in his brain. To fail at this – to be found out – carries a mysterious burden of anxiety and shame. “How are my eyes?”

— Michael Chabon

176. “To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her. A moment after he.”

— Michael Chabon

177. “If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it’s too late!”

— Michael Chabon

178. “You could almost see the idea elbowing its way around the inside of his mind, like Athena in the cranium of Zeus.”

— Michael Chabon

179. “I have a deadline. I’m glad. I think that will help me get it done.”

— Michael Chabon

180. “Chabon’s success can be traced back to three requirements: talent, luck, and discipline. “Discipline,” he says, “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

181. “She believed that it was important to put trust in children, to hand over the reins to them from time to time, to let them decide things for themselves.”

— Michael Chabon

182. “In photographs she is a boxy woman, girdled with steel, shod in coal-black stompers, her bosom so large it might have housed turbines. She was all but illiterate in Yiddish and English but obliged my grandfather, and later Uncle Ray, to read to her daily from the Yiddish press so that she could keep abreast of the latest calamities to beset Jewry. From.”

— Michael Chabon

183. “Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.”

— Michael Chabon

184. “On balance, most of the time, in the ordinary course of life, it was probably best to say what was in your heart, to share what was on your mind, to tell the people you loved that you loved them, to ask those you had harmed to forgive you and to confront those who had hurt you with the truth about the damage they had done. When it came to things that needed to be said, speech was always preferable to silence, but it was of no use at all in the presence of the unspeakable.”

— Michael Chabon

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

— Michael Chabon

186. “At the possibility of truly being seen, something in his chest seemed to snap open like a parachute.”

— Michael Chabon

187. “At any rate it is impossible to live intelligently as a member of a minority group in a nation that was founded every bit as firmly on enslavement and butchery as on ideals of liberty and brotherhood and not feel, at least every once in a while, that you can no more take for granted the continued tolerance of your existence here than you ought take the prosperity or freedom you enjoy.”

— Michael Chabon

188. “The girl was a labyrinth to him; only by chance and error did he ever stumble blindly into her heart.”

— Michael Chabon

189. “The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.”

— Michael Chabon

190. “Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.”

— Michael Chabon

191. “Huh-uh,” Archy said, not trying to charm or work her anymore, the deep 1978 El Cerrito–apartment sullenness starting to seep out of him as he remembered how Luther and Valletta used to leave him there all night by himself, nothing on the television but Wolfman Jack and some movie where a shark-toothed devil doll was biting Karen Black on the ankles.”

— Michael Chabon

192. “And yet for all that I still had never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things.”

— Michael Chabon

193. “In my innocent cynicism I didn’t see that Cleveland was not trying to look tough; he just didn’t care. Which is to say, he knew what he was, and was, if not content with, at least resigned to knowing that he was an alcoholic. And an alcoholic is nothing if not sensitive to the proper time and place for his next drink; his death is one of the most carefully planned and prepared for events in the world.”

— Michael Chabon

194. “That’s why school was invented – to give your parents some peace and quiet during the day.”

— Michael Chabon

195. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

196. “The leaves of this enormous tree, those are the million places where life lives and things happen and creatures come and go.”

— Michael Chabon

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

— Michael Chabon

198. “A few other couples joined us on the dance floor and we lost ourselves among them. I’d never been able to figure out exactly what was involved in slow dancing, so I contented myself, as I had since high school, with gripping my partner to me, letting out awkward breaths against her ear, and tipping from foot to foot like someone waiting for a bus. I could feel the sweat cooling on her forearms and smell a trace of apples in her hair.”

— Michael Chabon

199. “That was the purpose of habit, in my grandfather’s view: to render memory unnecessary.”

— Michael Chabon

200. “I searched my feelings, an activity never far removed from looking for a dead rat in a spidery crawl space under the house.”

— Michael Chabon