Michael Chabon Quotes

What I like most: Reading well-written sources that take me to another world for hours at a time - and being able to call that 'work!' Also, of course, finding a gem of information that is either exactly what I was looking for, or else fits perfectly into the story in some way.

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

After writing fiction for so long, I like the discovery element of nonfiction, in the sense that when you find the right information, it feels like gold.

I had learned that science is a rewarding, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had discovered.

Libraries are where we learn that we can live our lives through books.

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.

If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.

With time, many of the facts I learned were forgotten but I never lost the excitement of discovery.

We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.

Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.

Writing isn't necessarily about what one knows but what one wants to know.

I kind of do all of this writing as a way of thinking and learning. I'm sure it's similar to being a journalist: You get to learn, and that's the greatest kind of job.

Most of us fully expect that we're going to learn things we didn't know about.

Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search.

When I don't know the answer to something, I write a book about it because it gives me a chance to explore it and go to some people who do have the answers.

Reading is also a journey. It's a process of discovery.

Ultimately, writing is about trusting your own mind. It is an act of discovery.

Every time I've learned something, I've realized there are a hundred more things I don't know about the thing I just learned.

As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery.

Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth. A system, built upon the discoveries of a great many minds, is always of more strength, than what is produced by the mere workings of any one mind, which, of itself, can do very little. There is not so poor a book in the world that would not be a prodigious effort were it wrought out entirely by a single mind, without the aid of prior investigators.

The rainbow is such a remarkable phenomenon of nature, and its cause has been so meticulously sought after by inquiring minds throughout the ages, that I could not choose a more appropriate subject for demonstrating how, with the method I am using, we can arrive at knowledge not possessed at all by those whose writings are available to us.

Learning is a constant process of discovery - a process without end.

The sequence of theorist, experimenter, and discovery has occasionally been compared to the sequence of farmer, pig, truffle. The farmer leads the pig to an area where there might be truffles. The pig searches diligently for the truffles. Finally, he locates one, and just as he is about to devour it, the farmer snatches it away.

I don't see writing as a communication of something already discovered, as "truths" already known. Rather, I see writing as a job of experiment. It's like any discovery job; you don't know what's going to happen until you try it.

There are 20,000 million books I could have to read, but I can pick the ones and know that I'm learning something that I didn't know before. That's the glory of writing. It's not even so much the writing, it's what you learn - especially history - because so much of it is research.