[His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him, you could feel your luck changing for the worse.

— Michael Chabon

I agreed to keep the cards a secret and asked my grandmother if she believed in magic. She said she did not but that, surprisingly, magic worked even if you did not believe in it.

— Michael Chabon

I don't care what is written," Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag.

— Michael Chabon

I HAD known him as a bulldozer, as a samurai, as an android programmed to kill, as Plastic Man and Titanium Man and Matter-Eater Lad, as a Buick Electra, as a Petering truck, and even, for a week, as the Mackinac Bridge, but it was as a werewolf that Timothy Stokes finally went too far.

— Michael Chabon

I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary part of writing fiction but as virtual guarantor, insofar as such a thing is possible, of the power of my work: as a sign that I am on the right track, that I am following the recipe correctly, speaking the proper spells. Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth, when the truth matters most, is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth. The adept handles the rich material, the rank river clay, and diligently intones his alphabetical spells, knowing full well the history of golems: how they break free of their creators, grow to unmanageable size and power, refuse to be controlled. In the same way, the writer shapes his story, flecked like river clay with the grit of experience and rank with the smell of human life, heedless of the danger to himself, eager to show his powers, to celebrate his mastery, to bring into being a little world that, like God’s, is at once terribly imperfect and filled with astonishing life. Originally published in The Washington Post Book World

— Michael Chabon

I'm disappointed in myself. In my life. All my life, everything I tried, I only got halfway there. You try to take advantage of the time you have. That's what they tell you to do. But when you're old, you look back, and you see all you did, with all that time, is waste it. All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn't finish. Things you fought with all your heart to build that didn't last or fought with all your heart to get rid of, and they're all still around. I'm ashamed of myself.

— Michael Chabon

In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you.

— Michael Chabon

I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the clichés and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the clichés and conventions of the young.

— Michael Chabon

I said that I had heard curiosity could be harmful, in particular to cats

— Michael Chabon

It drains the bars and cafés after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped Formica counter, and thrums with the gossip of criminals, policemen, starkers, and schlemiels, whores and night owls ... three or four floaters, solitaries, and drunks between benders lean against the sparkly resin counter, sucking the tea from their shekels and working the calculations of their next big mistake.

— Michael Chabon