Michael Chabon Quotes

If you take my stuff apart, you'll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who's probably my favourite writer.

In 'Open City,' there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in 'Dubliners.' That is because a novel is also a literary conversation.

There are only so many stories in the world... Duplication of plots is bound to happen because most writers have read very extensively in their genre and have become aware they are adding an extra layer to the meta-narrative, finding a new spin on the original.

Unlike novels with a hero or two heroines, in 'One Amazing Thing,' all the characters tell stories they've never told anyone before, so all the voices become equally important.

Proust, my big inspiration for 'Goon Squad,' uses music a lot in his novel, both in terms of plot and structure. I liked the idea of doing the same thing, which is one reason I structured 'Goon Squad' as a record album, with an A side and a B side, that's built around the contrasting sounds of the individual numbers in it.

I think cinema is linked to literature by a lot of social ways. Our brains are full of literature - my brain is.

At a very young age, I was influenced enormously by Julio Cortazar or Carlos Fuentes. In that literature, there's always an exploration of different perspectives, points of view.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

Michael Chabon has long moved easily between the playful, heartfelt realism of novels like 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh' and 'Wonder Boys' and his playful, heartfelt, more fantastical novels like 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay' and 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.'

I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.

I admired Mary's work very much. From the time someone gave me 'The Liars' Club,' I immediately went into a world where I grew up. And I remember, when I finished the book, I actually thought, 'You know what, I need to write songs with her.'

It takes about seventy-five pages for a Parker reference - from 'The Score,' specifically - to show up in Geoff Manaugh's 'A Burglar's Guide to the City.'

Virginia Woolf's literature really transformed my own ideas about how to formally represent the passage of time and how time affects us. Specifically, the benchmarks are 'Mrs. Dalloway,' 'To the Lighthouse' and 'Orlando,' all of which have time as a central conceit.

Let us now celebrate the literary allusion.

I see a lot of similarities and coincidences in life, in general.

Magic realism - somebody used that phrase the other day that is familiar with South American literature. That rang a bell. It resonates with me.

At the end of the day, storytelling is actually very simple in its origin as long as there are people who want to tell stories and there are people who want to hear them.

I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.

It’s as much a writer’s concern, who is responsible to his readers for all the books written before him as well as those which will be written after him.

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

It's different to read a book for pleasure than to read it analytically. In the past, I'd read Pride and Prejudice for pleasure. This time, I was really looking at the structure, the order of events, how the characters interact with each other and how the book is paced.

Other people’s words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people’s words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you’re going.

A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.

I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though itwere only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.