Michael Chabon Quotes

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years.

I have a hard time finding something that I really enjoy reading, but I read 'The Great Gatsby' every summer.

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because, to some degree, I projected upon it.

I tend not to be so attracted to films that force me into an intellectual place over an emotional one.

My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it's like I am sending them a letter.

My favourite book - 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford, which I have read about 20 times - is different from my favourite author, who is Iris Murdoch. I find her books exciting and unputdownable. Her characters are so carefully studied and in-depth; I love that.

I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

I think that 'Mary Poppins' needs a subtle reader, in many respects, to grasp all its implications, and I understand that these cannot be translated in terms of the film.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

I love all genres. The only thing I get stymied by is the Family Drama. I don't necessarily know how to approach that.

I am a rereader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Celine, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is so much to revisit. 'Ingrid Caven,' by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation. I used to read 'Morvern Callar,' by Alan Warner, every year - I adored that book.

I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.

Historically speaking, the books I usually connect with the most are written in first-person narrative.

If you tell a story that's only allegory, then it doesn't help you at all. If it doesn't bring some emotional charge, then it's just talking about something.

There's a little bit of me in everybody that I play.

As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants.

I read 'Love in the Time of Cholera' when I was 19, and I still think about the characters.

Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we're all stories of our own narrative.

I can't imagine writing a screenplay where I didn't feel deeply connected at some kind of visceral level to the material.

We used to go to movies to see stories about ourselves. It would transport us to new worlds and we'd see aspects of ourselves reflected back.

Works of art are like a Trojan horse. Under the surface is always some artist's deeply held philosophy on their view of the world. But on the other hand, you do not want to make it feel like medicine. You do not want to make it feel like an afternoon TV special where you're trying to hammer a message into someone's head.

Every single character I've ever played has a little bit of me in them just because every single human in the world has a little bit of everything in them.

The experience of watching great cinema - great art - is life enriching and spiritually uplifting no matter whether it's about as difficult as it gets, like 'Breaking the Waves,' or as light as it gets, like 'Jerry Maguire,' 'Election' or 'Toy Story.'

I am trying to do films that stay with me for some time. 'Banaras' stays with me.