Dan Chaon Quotes

There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything.

A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.

I knew I wanted to play around with genre-esque imagery, and the identity theft stuff came in the middle, when I was figuring out how the characters were connected to those images.

The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my wife and kids.

Maybe love, like suffering, is relative.

I think we're always in some ways writing to the teachers who gave us early love.

Identity issues are hardwired into the way I think about character - it's almost as if I can't get away from them even if I want to.

I've never been able to sleep very much, even when I was a kid. I used to hate being forced to lay in bed in the darkness, and just shifting in bed and staring at the shadows.

I like to sleep about four or five really solid hours at night, and then sometimes take a nap in the afternoon or early evening after dinner. I love naps.

It had occurred to him that if the undead don't realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

I tend to like order in almost every other aspect of my life, but for me, the process of writing is really chaotic and decadent and indulgent.

There's a lot of effort expended once you begin to completely trash your life. Sometimes, writing feels like this to me.

In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I'm having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books.

Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.

I still think about the writers I loved when I was a kid.

Maybe it's because I grew up during the MTV generation, but to me a perfect song is one I can imagine a music video to, a song that can take you into a dream.

I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

I have long admired Caroline Leavitt's probing insight into people, her wit and compassion, her ability to find humor in dark situations, and conversely, her tenderness towards characters.

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.

I know a lot of people don't listen to music when they're writing because it distracts them, but for me it's almost a way to get into the self-hypnotic state that I need to be in to write.

I don't think anybody deals well with tragedy or grief, but maybe my characters are particularly bad at it. Which is why I love them.

I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.

You can recognize in your own reading habits what writers are doing that works and what doesn't. I'm becoming much more aware of that after reading a decade of student stories.

Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

The danger in writing about a world you don't know very well is that you can get lost in it, and sometimes I'll end up with a hundred pages I don't know what to do with.

The feeling of being an outsider, and the identity theme, are hardwired into me. If there's anything really autobiographical in my fiction, it's that feeling. I always feel that way.

My main reader was my wife Sheila, and I haven't written a lot since she died.

For me, the process of writing a novel happens mostly in your head before you actually start writing.

The kind of person I find myself interested in is a cross between being very emotionally complex and very immature. That's what I felt I was like when I was younger.

Writing about women's sexuality is very scary for me because I'm always afraid I'll get it wrong.

Plot was always secondary in my mind.

It is not like a premonition of death. It is as if she died a long time ago, and she just now remembered it.

If no one knows you, then you are no one.

There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?

Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.

You can go on like this for a very long time, and no one will notice. You keep thinking you're going to hit some sort of bottom, but I'm here to tell you: There is no bottom.

The thing that made me turn more towards writing was realizing how hard it was going to be to get a singular vision on film and how much more control I would have if I were writing novels.

In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love.

At a certain point, you must be able to slip loose. At a certain point, you found that you had been set free. You could be anyone, he thought. You could be anyone.

I've had a lot of different lives. I was adopted, I grew up in Nebraska, and then I went to Northwestern... Then I had this really extraordinary, different life than my parents.

You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.

You can't count on notoriety lasting very long, and there's no way to predict whether anyone will care about your books or you in three years, let alone ten or twenty.

I wanted to write a horror story. But in some ways, I have always thought of myself as a kind of ghost-story/horror writer, though most of the time the supernatural never actually appears on stage.

So this was what it felt like to lose yourself. Again. To let go of your future and let it rise up and up until finally you couldn't see it anymore, and you knew that you had to start over.

Fiction is fun because you get to steal an identity and try to make it authentic.

I usually have more than one thing I'm working on at once - I've been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth.

You want a child because it is a link in the bridge that you are building between the past and the future, a cantilever that holds you, so that you are not alone.