Michael Chabon Quotes

There were many times eating ramen noodles and sitting on a friend's couch watching ESPN where I was like, 'This is not what I thought California was going to be like. I thought it was going to be pools and cocktails with umbrellas in them and Maseratis, but this ain't it.'

It is hard when you think you can do better, but things just aren't working out.

I have made a number of movies that I have never seen. It's not a matter of ego. It's a matter of being disappointed. It's really a shame. It's just as difficult to make a movie that no one cares about as to make a hit.

It sounds ideal, a sort of beach childhood. But it wasn't really. I didn't use the beach very much at all.

What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.

It's a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile. He was constantly having to make excuses for me.

During my freshman year of college, it became undeniably clear that I didn't want to be great again. I correlated greatness with misery.

Things don't always work out as you want them to.

Manchester United was a sad experience. Things didn't go as I had hoped. I was disappointed, and it didn't help me to rise to the surface.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

I'm not really satisfied with anything I have written to date.

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.

At 30 I thought my life was over. I thought I'd have made something of myself by then, that life would somehow have made the necessary arrangements - but actually I had nothing.

I thought that when I won the Olympic trials I was going to be the happiest person in the whole world. And I was happy. But it wasn't like I thought it was going to be. I had already imagined it in my head so many times. It was real before it happened.

And I thought my loss my loss was not, certainly, the end of the world, but to lessen the enthusiasm of those young people who were signed up, I thought that was tragic.

The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition.

I should have been deliriously happy. I had my dream come true. I'm a best-selling author. So why is everything in my life, including my writing, going bad?

Nothing seems to come up to your expectations. But nothing I had heard about Hollywood was enough.

I think that if you idealise someone for so long, they can only disappoint and I wouldn't want to be disappointed by those people.

I don't want to dream anymore, I want my life to be real!

I have never been accepted. I'll never make the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They're never going to let me in.

It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.

Many a person who started out to conquer the world in shining army has ended up just getting along. The horse got tired, the army rusty. The goal was removed and unsure.