Mendel had a remarkable nature as a boy. I’m not talking about miracles. Miracles are a burden for a Aladdin, not the proof of one. Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir. There was something in Mendel. There was a fire.

— Michael Chabon

Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.

— Michael Chabon

Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.

— Michael Chabon

[My dad] didn't do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn't take me to get my hair cut, or my teeth cleaned; he didn't make the appointments. He didn't shop for my clothes. Furthermore, he didn't make my breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My mom did all of those things, and nobody ever told her when she did them that it made her a good mother.

— Michael Chabon

My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother's illness, but when it came to the origins of the Skinless Horse he thought he understood. The Skinless Horse was a creature sworn to pursue my grandmother no matter where she went on the face of the globe, whispering to her in the foulest terms of her crimes and the blackness of her soul. There was a voice like that in everyone's head, he figured; in my grandmother's case it was just a matter of degree. You could almost see the Skinless Horse as a clever adaptation, a strategy for survival evolved by a proven survivor. If you kept the voice inside your head, the way most people did, there could really be only one way to silence it. He admired the defiance, the refusal to surrender, involuntary but implicit in the act of moving that reproachful whisperer to a shadowy corner of a room, an iron furnace in a cellar, the branches of a grand old tree.

— Michael Chabon

One of the fundamental axioms of masculine self-regard is that the tools and appurtenances of a man's life must be containable within the pockets of his jacket and pants. Wallet, keys, gum, show or ball game tickets, Kleenex, condoms, cell phone, maybe a lighter and a pack of cigarettes: Just cram it all in there, motherfucker.

— Michael Chabon

Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.

— Michael Chabon

People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to l

— Michael Chabon

… remembered summer light, and the luminous inverted ghost of a boy with a parrot on his shoulder.

— Michael Chabon

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

— Michael Chabon