A Quote by Michael Chabon
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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If someone plays a brooding actor in a film, people think they're brooding all the time.
Forced to confront a reptile or an international financial crisis, I'll take the reptile every time.
Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.
Why would you want to stay manager and be second-guessed by me when you can come up into the front-office and be one of the second-guessers?
America was the one territory where they didn't release 'Nights In White Satin' at the time it was made. It was about three or four months later, after 'Tuesday Afternoon,' so I think we have a special fondness for it.
If we could turn around and stand back, then we would see the whole complete pattern. And therefore what we have to do in this lifetime is to perfect this pattern, so that it will continue a most beautiful pattern next time and next time and next time and next time because we vowed until samsara is empty! Now, that's going to be a long time, so you'd better get prepared for the long haul, and the best way to do that is to really prepare yourself as much as possible in this lifetime, and not waste your opportunities so that we can genuinely benefit beings, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.
There's some ignorant people in the world, and if I spend time trying to convince people to think like me, I'll be wasting valuable time I could use to be growing my business, perfecting my craft as a fighter, watching film, studying, or just enjoying time with my family. Or just sleeping.
I would like to break out of this "dark, brooding" image, cause I'm actually not like that at all. In Ireland, brooding is a term we use for hens. A brooding hen is supposed to lay eggs. Everytime somebody says "He's dark and brooding" I think: "He's about to lay an egg".
Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.
Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.... Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.... Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.
But how ridiculous that I should bereft simply because I couldn’t spend hours in my world of make-believe! Wasn’t the reality of my life interesting enough? This is surely the time to let go of grievances, I told myself sternly. What good does it do to dwell on them? Brooding on a nest of grudges will only hatch more grief.
I am the luckiest novelist in the world. I was a first-time novelist who wasn't awash in rejection slips, whose manuscript didn't disappear in slush piles. I have had a wonderful time.
I always see something for sure one time and then I make myself see it a second time. Because second time is like, 'OK, I'm not that bad. I'm not that horrible.' But the first time I just think I'm god-awful.
You know, Hillary Clinton's out there saying, we need smart diplomacy. We need to do smart power. And that means empathizing with our enemy, understanding their grievances, like we understand the grievances of homosexuals, like we understand the grievances of African-Americans. We must learn to understand the grievances of ISIS.
Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. We lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year's time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings.
Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.
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