Michael Chabon Quotes

I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature.

I don't think you can ever assess your work. I don't think Turgenev could assess his any more than I can assess mine, and his didn't have a social impact as much as great literary impact.

No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.

The average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) "Above all no enthusiasm".

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic.

I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.

The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.

I used to be more of a purist about literature. I thought, 'If it's a really propulsive story, then maybe there's something unliterary about it.'

Sometimes novels are considered 'important' in the way medicine is - they taste terrible and are difficult to get down your throat, but are good for you.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

I don't think if you're serious about literature your library is filled with award-winning books.

I see 'Eligible' as a homage, and I see 'Pride and Prejudice' as a perfect book. You can dispute whether this project is a good idea, but you can't dispute my fondness for the novel.

I'm not really a mainstream novelist!

It's hard to judge literary merit.

There's no literary merit in my books.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value.

Between 1961 and 1982, 'The Catcher in the Rye' was the most censored book in high schools and libraries in the United States. But all the talk about banning it made me rush out to find it.

We take literature too seriously.