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All the preparation in the world doesn't avail you if you can't make that imaginative leap and put yourself in the position of the characters you've created, to imagine what it's like to be somebody else.

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
Make
Characters
Like
Created
World
Position
Somebody
Imagine
Avail
Doesn
Imaginative
Else
Leap
Character
Preparation

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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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It was nice standing out in the darkness, in the damp grass, with spring coming on and a feeling in my heart of imminent disaster.
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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.
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A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.
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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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There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it she infused it.
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That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution.
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I said, “I need to hear something that’s going to save my life.” Re: Selecting songs from a jukebox.
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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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In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.
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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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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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There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.
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Not only would I never want to belong to any club that would have me for a member--if elected I would wear street shoes onto the squash court and set fire to the ballroom curtains.
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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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That's why school was invented - to give your parents some peace and quiet during the day.
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Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.
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I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.
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[Comics] were viewed as the literary equivalent of bubblegum cards, meant to be poked into the spokes of a young mind where they would produce a satisfying but entirely bogus rumble of pleasure.
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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.
Michael Chabon