Michael Chabon

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

Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the middle sixties and late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age.

Entertainment is a sacred pursuit when done well. When done well it raises the quality of human life.

So it was scary, but that's how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong.

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

I wasn't involved, except to the degree that they sent me drafts of the script as the writer turned them in. They asked me at one point to write a memo about what I thought of it.

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.

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

Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.

It's good to have it over with. I worked on it a long time, and I didn't know what people were going to think of it. Would people like it? Would they buy it? So far it's been doing pretty well.

Joe is the hero and Sammy is the sidekick. That's how I feel about it.

It was fun. That was something I came to fairly late.

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.

It is unusual for Joe to be that way, but that's what interested me.

I have a deadline. I'm glad. I think that will help me get it done.

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.

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.

A father is a man who fails every day.

Every time another review comes out I let out a deep breath.

As soon as I read that, it clicked: that's my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place.

That was all very nice of them. They didn't have to do anything because I wasn't officially involved at all.

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.

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 was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.

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 love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It's a devastating novel.

With patience and calm, persistence and stoicism, good handwriting and careful labeling, they would meet persecution, indignity, and hardship head-on.

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

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.

Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands.

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.

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.

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

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.