Michael Chabon
Pulitzer Prize winning American author, essayist, short-story writer, and screenwriter.
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.
Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength.
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. I had one fragrant ounce of Humboldt County, California, in a Ziploc bag in the glove compartment of my car.
There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.
"I feel great," I said, trying to decide how I did feel.
I'm a man who falls in love so easily, and with such a reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer.
I think it was when I got to the butterflies -- in that brief, beautiful image comprising life, death and technology -- that the hair on the back of my neck began to stand on end. All at once, the pleasure I took in reading was altered irrevocably. Before then I had never noticed, somehow, that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot but of language. And not merely of pretty words and neat turns of phrase, but of systems of imagery, strategies of metaphor.
When Berkeley does not feel like some kind of vast exercise in collective dystopia—a kind of left-wing Plymouth Plantation in which a man may be pilloried for over-illuminating his house at Christmastime—then paradoxically it often feels like a place filled with people incapable of feeling or acting in concert with each other.
...as with most redheaded women what beauty she possessed was protean and odd.
“Are you mocking the concept?”
“Not necessary,” Berko says. “The concept mocks itself.”
We don't want teenagers to write violent poems, horrifying stories, explicit lyrics and rhymes; they're ugly, in precisely the way that we are ugly, and out of protectiveness and hypocrisy, even out of pity and love and tenderness, we try to force young people to be innocent of everything but the effects of that ugliness.
I would give a good deal of money, blood, books or years to be able to watch as Amanda, in a picture hat, looked back from the vantage of a long and productive career to reject her first published efforts as uneven or only halfway there or, worst of all, as promising, or to see her condescend to them, cuddle them almost, as mature writers sometimes do with their early books, the way we give our old stuffed pony or elephant, with its one missing shirt-button eye, a fond squeeze before returning it to the hatbox in the attic.
I had a certain cetacean delicacy of movement in the wide open sea of a hundred-yard field...
[L]ook at yourself right now... hoping to lose yourself—your home, your certainties, the borders and boundaries of your life—by means of a bundle of wood pulp, sewn and glued and stained with blobs of pigment and resin. People with Books. ... It makes me want to laugh.
Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture.
He’s too superstitious not to see this as a bad omen, but when you're a pessimist, all omens are bad.
Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.
He knows, of course, that a criminal organization like the Verbover ring can’t flourish without the ready services of bagman and secret lobbyists, without regular applications of grease and body English to the works of government.
Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.
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.