Michael Chabon Quotes

The thing with 'Lost Without You' is that for a long time I didn't feel like I could share it with people. When it came to releasing it, it was a cliff-diving moment.

I am quite an insecure person, and I think that, like any director, if I'm asked about my vision for a piece, I feel very vulnerable.

It felt like a huge risk when I first started putting my comic online. It was very scary to put myself out there that way and to open up something that I cared about very dearly - and to be the only creator involved with it.

I can't really explain the feeling of acting. It makes you the most insecure you can possibly be.

I do everything I watch, whether it's like a big comic book film that I've done or something very serious and raw.I do have that initial feeling like I'm the worst, this is awful, my work is - I've let everybody down. I definitely have that.

Production is something I've never come to terms with.

It's like these songs are your babies and you don't want anybody to think your babies are ugly! You never really know until you throw it out there if it's gonna take. And that is a really scary and vulnerable place to be, so having those songs be embraced is the best feeling in the world. That's been our dream our whole lives.

It's still difficult for me to watch my work.

Anytime you work with materials that are deep parts of yourself, you feel revulsion at showing things about yourself that you don't want people to know.

When I show a film at a festival, I am showing myself. Everything is at stake for me.

That's what it is every time you walk into the room to write with someone new. It's like, oh god I have to take my clothes off 'my creative clothes' and let them see all of my flaws.

People ask me when I decided to become a playwright, and I tell them I decide to do it every day. Most days it's very hard because I'm frightened - not frightened of writing a bad play, although that happens often with me. I'm frightened of encountering the wilderness of my own spirit, which is always , no matter how many plays I write, a new and uncharted place. Every day when I sit down to write, I can't remember how it's done.

You perform the thing that you made, that's inside of you, and to subject that to any kind of scrutiny is terrifying. It's still terrifying to me.

If you're doing your job properly, you take the risk of feeling slightly foolish and delve in and bring out the emotions.

Most artists, ashamed of their need for encouragement, try to carry their work to term like a secret pregnancy.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

Every time I create something, just before that there's a kind of - you're feeling very low, you're feeling very down and insecure. Then you create and then it's fine. This is the way I observe me doing it.

I confess, right at the start, to the doubts - and sometimes outright dreads - that go with me as I climb the stairs to my study in the morning, coffee mug in hand: I have to admit to the habitual apprehension mixed with a sort of reverence, as I light the incense . . . and wonder: what is going to happen today? Will anything happen? Will the angel come today?

A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

I feel guilty when people say I'm the greatest on the scene. What's good or bad doesn't matter to me; what does matter is feeling and not feeling. If only people would take more of a true view and think in terms of feelings. Your name doesn't mean a damn, it's your talents and feelings that matter. You've got to know much more than just the technicalities of notes; you've got to know what goes between the notes.

There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.

If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?”'afterwards than before There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive.

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write