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I suppose there is something appealing about a word that everyone uses with absolute confidence but on whose exact meaning no two people can agree. The word that I'm thinking of right now is genre, one of those French words, like crêpe, that no one can pronounce both correctly and without sounding pretentious.

Michael Chabon

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Michael Chabon
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: May 24
Author
Columnist
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Television Producer
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Leon Chaim Bach
Malachi B. Cohen
August Van Zorn
Without
Confidence
Exact
Right
Meaning
Uses
Something
Whose
French
Thinking
Word
Genre
Pronounce
Like
Words
Suppose
Sounding
People
Everyone
Absolutes
Appealing
Use
Absolute
Pretentious
Two
Agree
Correctly

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He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn't belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged.
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In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time.
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There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.
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Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.
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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.
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I thought, I fanced, that in a moment, I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has.
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Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the middle sixties and late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age.
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Procrastination is something you do yourself. You know: I gotta sharpen these pencils before I start. I got 20 pencils, they're looking kinda dull. Well, the pencils aren't calling you and alluring you and inviting you and offering you anything. They're just sitting there. You're the one who's procrastinating.
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Novelist time is reptile time novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs.
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The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.
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Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.
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When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, 'In everything but sexual preference.
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That's why school was invented - to give your parents some peace and quiet during the day.
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I knew that I shouldn’t have, but I did it all the same and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together.
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My heart was simultaneously broken and filled with lust, I was exhausted, and I loved every minute of it. It was strange and elating to find myself for once the weaker.
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Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself.
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I was surprised that my wife thought it was a good idea, then again with my agent, another woman, then my editor, another woman - in spite of the fact that all three of them reacted positively I still have this fear.
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A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos –like amber in which a memory gets trapped.
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As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.
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