"I would give a good deal of money, blood, books or years to be able to watch as Amanda, in a picture hat, looked back from the vantage of a long and productive career to reject her first published efforts as uneven or only halfway there or, worst of all, as promising, or to see her condescend to them, cuddle them almost, as mature writers sometimes do with their early books, the way we give our old stuffed pony or elephant, with its one missing shirt-button eye, a fond squeeze before returning it to the hatbox in the attic.At bottom of this kind of behavior on the part of old, established writers is the undeniable way in which our young selves, and the books that issued from them, invariably seem to reproach us: with the fading of our fire, the diminishment of our porousness to the world and the people in it, the compromises made, the friendships abandoned, the opportunities squandered, the loss of velocity on our fastball."
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
About Amanda Davis, who died at the age of 32 in a plane crash
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…"