It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is. Also, the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.

— Michael Chabon

It takes a sour woman to make a good pickle.

— Michael Chabon

It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him.

— Michael Chabon

I was afraid that I had made a profound, irrevocable mistake, and that, as in a fantastic tale, if I did not find something firm and magical to grab a hold of right that moment we would both be swallowed up by a noisome gang of black shapes and evil black birds.

— Michael Chabon

I was conscious, then, of a different ache, deeper and more sharp than the feeling of bereavement that a hangover will sometimes uncover in the heart.

— Michael Chabon

{...} I was okay with things the way they were. No, not okay: I longed and suffered and pined with the rest of humanity. Sometimes I was happy enough with the book I was reading or the book I was writing, and the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day. But most of the time I was just plain dying to get out. All I needed—all I have ever needed—was someone to challenge me, to serve as a goad, an instigator, a stirrer of the pot. I hated trouble, but I loved troublemakers. I hated chance and uncertainty, but I was drawn to those who showed up on your doorstep with their own pair of dice.

— Michael Chabon

Landsman and Bin were married to each other for twelve years and together for five before that. Each was the other's first lover, first betrayer, first refuge, first roommate, first audience, first person to turn to when something -- even the marriage itself -- went wrong. For half their lives they tangled their histories, bodies, phobias, theories, recipes, libraries, record collections. They mounted spectacular arguments, nose-to-nose, hands flying, spittle flying, throwing things, kicking things, breaking things, rolling around on the ground grabbing up fistfuls of each other's hair. The next day he would bear the red moons of Bin's nails in his cheeks and on the meat of his chest, and she wore his purple fingerprints like an armlet.

— Michael Chabon

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.

— Michael Chabon

Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in.

— Michael Chabon

Love great first lines and paragraphs. From The Yiddish Policemen's Union:Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker.

— Michael Chabon