"I have staked my career—my life itself—on the things I could see, on the stories I could credit, and on the eventual vindication, when the book was closed, of the reasonable and skeptical approach. In the face of twenty-five years of bloodshed, mayhem, criminality, and the universal human pastime of ruination, I have clung fiercely to Occam’s razor, seeking always to keep my solutions unadorned and free of conjecture, and never to resort to conspiracy or any kind of prosecutorial woolgathering. My mother, whenever she was confronted by calamity or personal sorrow, invoked cosmic emanations, invisible empires, ancient prophecies, and intrigues; it has been the business of my life to reject such folderol and seek the simpler explanation. But we were fools, she and I, arrant blockheads, each of us blind to or heedless of the readiest explanation: that the world is an ungettable joke, and our human need to explain its wonders and horrors, our appalling genius for devising such explanations, is nothing more than the rim shot that accompanies the punch line."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Pulitzer Prize winnersNovelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesChildren's authorsScreenwriters from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
The God of Dark Laughter, The New Yorker (April 9, 2001)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Chabon
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Michael Chabon
66 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Michael Chabon →
Related Quotes
"[I]n 1938, Superman appeared. He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, b…"
"When Berkeley does not feel like some kind of vast exercise in collective dystopia—a kind of left-wing Plymouth Plant…"
"Although it was only nine o'clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he'd strapped hi…"
"Forget about what you are escaping from," he said, quoting an old maxim of Kornblum's. "Reserve your anxiety for what…"
"Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture."
"[I]f neuroses were swimming pools one might, like Cheever's swimmer, steer a course from my house to the city limits …"
"The whiskey tasted like bear steaks and river mud and the flesh of an oak tree. I had another swallow because it tast…"
"I found myself going over a particular troublesome scene in the novel, for the one thousand and seventy-third time, i…"
"To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learne…"
"The rest of Sitka’s homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematica…"