Michael Chabon: I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by th...

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

stars body commitment

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

Michael Chabon

escaping anxiety forget

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

Michael Chabon

care powerful imagination

Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness.

Michael Chabon

pieces broken long

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

risk moments feelings

Maybe all wondrous books appear in our lives the way Milo’s tollbooth appears, an inexplicable gift, cast up by some curious chance that comes to feel, after we have finished and fallen in love with the book, like the workings of a secret purpose. Of all the enchantments of beloved books the most mysterious-the most phantasmal-is the way they always seem to come our way precisely when we need them.

Michael Chabon

enchantment secret book

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

Michael Chabon

denial differences used

For me, nostalgia is an involuntary emotion. ... I think it's just a natural human response to loss.

Michael Chabon

emotion loss thinking

Never say love is "like" anything... It isn't.

Michael Chabon

inspiring love-is love

Not only would I never want to belong to any club that would have me for a member--if elected I would wear street shoes onto the squash court and set fire to the ballroom curtains.

Michael Chabon

squash shoes fire

All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction....Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving--amateurs--we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers--should we be lucky enough to find any--some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff that we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

Michael Chabon

greatness taken games

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

successful writing two

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.

Michael Chabon

stars writing lying

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

Michael Chabon

knowing giving character

It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology.

Michael Chabon

apology accepting simple

It was the kind of promise a father makes easily and sincerely, knowing at the same time that it will be impossible to keep. The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart. A game of baseball can't really make a summer day last forever. A home run can't really heal all the broken places in our world, or in a single human heart. And there was no way that Mr. Feld could keep his promise never to leave Ethan again. All parents leave their children one day.

Michael Chabon

baseball summer running

There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.

Michael Chabon

embarrassing animal

Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!

Michael Chabon

eyeglasses girl dark

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

Michael Chabon

bliss novel influence

They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other

Michael Chabon

listening dark heart

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.