Words matter. These are the best Michael Chabon Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, a planned community built during the sixties. During the early years, it was very integrated. I grew up being taught by black teachers with black principals and vice principals and, you know, a lot of black friends. We played in mixed groups, and I kind of thought that was how it was.
I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.
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. I also just have a good feeling for how words are made and formed in English and the etymologies that give you prefixes and suffixes.
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.
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.
I am a huge, raving fan of writer Matt Fraction. His semi-indie ‘Casanova’ series is an ongoing masterpiece of 21st-century American comics – and his run on ‘Immortal Iron Fist’ with Ed Brubaker was pure, yummy martial-arts-fantasy deliciousness.
That’s the best thing about writing, when you’re in that zone, you’re porous, ready to absorb the solution.
I work at night, starting at around 10 o’clock and working until 2 or 3 in the morning. I do that usually five days a week. In Berkeley, I have an office behind our house that I share with my wife, who works more in the daytime.
I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.
Nothing ever comes out the way I hope it will. That first vision, that initial vision you have of a book, what it’s going to be like when it’s done, it begins to go wrong the second you start to write.
I have a deadline. I’m glad. I think that will help me get it done.
I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.
Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story.
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.
God, I just love ‘A Journey to the End of the Millennium,’ by A. B. Yehoshua. My favorite novel by an American Jew is probably ‘Humboldt’s Gift.’
The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.
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.
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.
I abandoned my second novel completely. Writing ‘Kavalier & Clay,’ I had several moments of utter collapse. Same with ‘The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.’
It’s always thrilling to encounter the sweep of time in a work of fiction in a way that feels authentic and real.
I remember tearing up the first time I read Nabokov’s description, in ‘Speak, Memory,’ of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering muzhiks, with its astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning.
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.
