Writing Quotes by Michael Chabon

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

— Michael Chabon

When I'm writing solitude feels very good. But when I'm not writing it feels lonely... Having a big family solves that problem.

— Michael Chabon

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

— Michael Chabon

“this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing”

— Michael Chabon

When I finish a first draft, it's always just as much of a mess as it's always been. I still make the…

— Michael Chabon

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

— Michael Chabon

[While writing], I'll go anywhere I find that is quiet, has no internet. I have a big internet problem.

— Michael Chabon

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our…

— Michael Chabon

“I do my writing in the morning, now, if the boy will let me, and in the afternoon when I’m not teaching,…

— Michael Chabon

I wasn't involved, except to the degree that they sent me drafts of the script as the writer turned them in. They…

— Michael Chabon

Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam…

— Michael Chabon

“As I worked to rebuild the ghost town I had made, I felt keenly that my failure to help Timothy was really…

— Michael Chabon

I'm never going to be a Tom Clancy. And I wouldn't really want to be - not that I have anything against…

— Michael Chabon

Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain…

— Michael Chabon

“Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It…

— Michael Chabon

“I saw that I could write ten thousand more pages of shimmering prose and still be nothing but a blind minotaur stumbling…

— Michael Chabon

I don't think you could teach someone to be a genius, but you can certainly teach them to not make rookie mistakes…

— Michael Chabon

The problems you have as a novelist tend to have to do with making a living and trying to find ways to…

— Michael Chabon

“Yet entertainment--as I define it, pleasure and all--remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as…

— Michael Chabon

“This was the writer's true doppelgänger, I thought; not some invisible imp of the perverse who watched you from the shadows, periodically…

— Michael Chabon

I might spend 100 pages trying to get to know the world I'm writing about: its contours, who are my main characters,…

— Michael Chabon

For me, the goal is always to write a novel that I myself would like to read. People frequently ask me what…

— Michael Chabon

I feel that in the past, my style has shown itself to be capable of handling dark and light in the same…

— Michael Chabon

“I HAD known him as a bulldozer, as a samurai, as an android programmed to kill, as Plastic Man and Titanium Man…

— Michael Chabon

“For as long as I could remember, I'd been making vague and confident assurances that any day I would finish the thing…

— Michael Chabon

“Anyway, it's a pretty good story," I said. "You have to admit." "Yeah?" He crumpled up the Kleenex, having dispatched the solitary…

— Michael Chabon

“Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can…

— Michael Chabon

“The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct…

— Michael Chabon

“It seemed to me that Q. was talking about the nature of the midnight disease, which started as a simple feeling of…

— Michael Chabon

All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction…Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the…

— Michael Chabon

“It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some…

— Michael Chabon

“I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary…

— Michael Chabon

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things…

— Michael Chabon

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes…

— Michael Chabon

I love the internet and it has been incredibly useful and I have made discoveries that have been immeasurably crucial to my…

— Michael Chabon

Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere,…

— Michael Chabon

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn,…

— Michael Chabon

Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can…

— Michael Chabon

When I first decided I wanted to be a writer, when I was 10, 11 years old, the books that I loved…

— Michael Chabon

“I’m always thrilled,” wrote Alan Cheuse, emphasizing the novelty and, perhaps, the faint air of slumming that attends the notion of McCarthy’s…

— Michael Chabon