Literary Birthday – 24 May – Michael Chabon

Happy Birthday, Michael Chabon, born 24 May 1963.

Michael Chabon: 10 Quotes

1. It’s always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.
2. That’s the best thing about writing, when you’re in that zone, you’re porous, ready to absorb the solution.
3. Man makes plans … and God laughs.
4. When I finish a first draft, it’s always just as much of a mess as it’s always been. I still make the same mistakes every time.
5. You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.
6. I work at night, starting at around 10 o’clock and working until 2 or 3 in the morning. I do that usually five days a week. In Berkeley I have an office behind our house that I share with my wife, who works more in the daytime. It’s always been my tendency: working at night just seems quieter and I can focus more easily and the words tends to come more readily.
7. Ideas are the easy part. I spend a lot of time batting them away, trying to keep them from distracting me from what I actually have to focus on and finish.
8. When I consider the problem-solving nature of writing fiction – how whatever book I happen to be working on is always broken, stuck, incomplete, a Yale lock that won’t open, a subroutine that won’t execute, yet day after day I return to it knowing that if I just keep at it, I will pop the thing loose – it begins to seem to me that writing may be in part a disorder: sheer, unfettered XO9.
9. Well, the best part is that I get to do what I love. I love to write, and I get to do it for my living; it’s something I’m eternally grateful for every day. I feel so fortunate. Reading and writing and books and stories are things I’ve been in love with all my life. It’s still a matter of profound wonder and gratitude to me that this is my job.
10. I’m so grateful and so contented with my lot as a writer that I don’t even want to talk about the worst part—it will sound incredibly trivial by comparison. It’s probably something like: It takes so long to write a book. And having to stick with it, often long past the point where your original enthusiasm has waned, and trying to find ways to renew your enthusiasm over the long haul.

Michael Chabon is an American author. His first novel, The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh was published when he was 25 and he became a literary celebrity. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. He is married to writer, Ayelet Waldman.

Source for image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_Chabon_by_Gage_Skidmore.jpg

Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 by Amanda Patterson

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