Dan Chaon Quotes

#1. The circumstances of life-the events of life-the people around me in life-do not make me the way I am. They reveal the way I am.

Dan Chaon

#2. 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?

Dan Chaon

#3. 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.

Dan Chaon

#4. He had grown fond of the old proprietress, Mrs. Matalov, who had been a magician's assistant back in the 1930s, and who now, even at ninety-three, had the stoic dignity of a beautiful woman who was about to be cut in half.

Dan Chaon

#5. I was worried that, as a college teacher, if I wrote too much about intergenerational sex my students would be creeped out.

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

#7. I start with an image, then I go from the image toward exploring the situation. Then I write a scene, and from the scene I find the character, from the character I find the larger plot. It's like deductive reasoning - I start with the smaller stuff and work backward.

Dan Chaon

#8. 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.

Dan Chaon

#9. I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call 'contemporary headline horror,' stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news.

Dan Chaon

#10. Here is the door of my mom's house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.

Dan Chaon

#11. Fraj-ile, I say, pronouncing it the way she does - as if it might be a popular tourist destination in the Pacific, beautiful Fraj Isle, with its white sandy beaches and shark-filled coves.

Dan Chaon

#12. You look up for a moment and you're not sure which life is real. You've split yourself into so many honeycombed parts that they barely notice each other---all of them pacing, concurrently, parallel streams of though, and each one thinks of its self as me.

Dan Chaon

#13. As mysterious as the part of himself that was chosen and loved by her, the part of himself that was there only when they were together.

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

#15. The type of person who will always be your friend, for as long as you can stand to keep disappointing her.

Dan Chaon

#16. 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.

Dan Chaon

#17. A lot of people work really diligently to maintain a "profile" in the writing world, but that's so hard, and so boring most of the time. So you just keep doing what you like to do, I guess, and try to enjoy it.

Dan Chaon

#18. I guess," says Deagle, finally, "I'll just have a pack of Marlboro Lights. That's what I used to smoke when I was human.

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

#20. He pictures amputated human arms flopping like fish down the center of the road; syringes floating on beds of liposuctioned fat; gelatinous human eyeballs wiggling merrily as they roll down the highway; and so on. He could imagine other such grotesque stuff, but chooses not to.

Dan Chaon

#21. I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn't you think so? Doesn't it seem like houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing their hair in the street? I never - I never thought it would be this small, did you?

Dan Chaon

#22. The two of you stood there, side by side, and the tectonic plates of your lives began to shift and resettle, continents separating.

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

#24. It's always terrible when you realize that you've married the wrong book.

Dan Chaon

#25. 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.

Dan Chaon

#26. He had built his own future brick by brick around himself but there were no doors or windows, at least that was the way it seemed at the time he had thought to himself, I am locked in, it was like one of those ghost stories where you wake up and you are sealed in a coffin.

Dan Chaon

#27. You really romanticize the white-trash period of your life,' Rain once said to me, which I thought was a little hurtful but perhaps true.

Dan Chaon

#28. 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.

Dan Chaon

#29. 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.

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

#31. One of the things I rarely do is write about sex.

Dan Chaon

#32. She looked at me as if I might be one of them a spy from the world of the ignorant.

Dan Chaon

#33. Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

Dan Chaon

#34. 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.

Dan Chaon

#35. This is one of those things that you can never explain to anyone; that's what I want to explain - one of those free-association moments with connections that dissolve when you start to try to put them into words.

Dan Chaon

#36. A lot of time, with stories, I'll start out with a title and try to dream myself into the story that it evokes - a kind of subconscious exercise in which I'm trawling for some kind of entryway into fiction.

Dan Chaon

#37. Julie Orringer is the real thing, a breathtaking chronicler of the secrets and cruelties underneath the surface of middle-class American life. These are terrific stories-wise, compassionate and haunting.

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

#40. I keep a daily journal of whatever weird thought comes into my mind, like when I had a dream I was in North Dakota in the middle of a blizzard and for some reason the Egyptian pyramids were there, too - that I was able to shuffle into the book.

Dan Chaon

#41. 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.

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

#44. 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.

Dan Chaon

#45. The desire to remake that shrinking expanse of life they were still allotted, to make use of it, to fill it up with possibility. Oh please: one more transformation.

Dan Chaon

#46. There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything. Your future shifts and warps with your smallest step, your shitty little whims. The man you will become is at your mercy.

Dan Chaon

#47. As her husband held her close, she could feel the pulse of other choices, other lives, opening up beneath her. Her past crackled behind her like a terrible lightning, branches and branches, endless, and then nothing.

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

#50. The people who control this country are the real gangsters. You know that, right? And if you play by their rules, you're nothing but their slave.

Dan Chaon

#51. I should be arguing vehemently with doctors, demanding results, I should be surrounded by people who are bleeding and screaming and shocking one another with defibrillators.

Dan Chaon

#52. Plot was always secondary in my mind.

Dan Chaon

#53. 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.

Dan Chaon

#54. I read a lot, but at the same time I'm not a particularly good or diligent or discriminating reader. I go through maybe close to a thousand or more books a year, but a lot of times I'll only read bits and pieces of any one individual text.

Dan Chaon

#55. You could say that they were sweet, or you could say that they were something out of a horror movie.

Dan Chaon

#56. The thing that grounds you, and the thing that really gives you a sense of wholeness, is your family, friends and your community. Those are the things that can mirror back to you what you're experiencing, and can affirm to you that the stories you are telling are true.

Dan Chaon

#57. 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.

Dan Chaon

#58. In the basement of Sydney's new house is a little room that is about the size and shape of a coffin.

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

#60. People can find patterns in all kinds of random events. It's called apophenia. It's the tendency we humans have to find meaning in disconnected information.

Dan Chaon

#61. People write fiction in their minds all the time - every time we read a 'human interest' news story, or a true crime tale, we find ourselves fascinated because we're trying to understand why people behave the way they do, why they make the choices they do, how we become who we become.

Dan Chaon

#62. A lot of times in my short fiction there isn't much dramatized scene - there are a lot of short, interconnected bits, snippets of conversation, continual action, and so on. I frequently rely pretty heavily on voice.

Dan Chaon

#63. 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.

Dan Chaon

#64. 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.

Dan Chaon

#65. Your Mom's Car. Think about that. Try to wrap your brain around the supernatural and spiritual implications that the name bears down you. Your Mom's Car, holding its hand out straight, fingers curled, a zombie reaching for your neck.

Dan Chaon

#66. We are always telling stories to ourselves, about ourselves...But we can control those stories...I believe that! Events in our life have meaning because we choose to give it to them

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

#68. 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.

Dan Chaon

#69. 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.

Dan Chaon

#70. That night I sat up writing in my diary writing to Big Me: 'I hope you are alive ' I wrote. 'I hope that I don't die before you are able to read this.

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

#72. That's how I work, whether with stories or novels - they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I'm walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.

Dan Chaon

#73. There are a great number of what appear to be teenage runaways, but in Portland it seems that even the elderly dress as if they are teenage runaways, in hoodies and kerchiefs and ragged jeans, stinking of patchouli and dirty feet, and one tattooed old man even rolls by on a skateboard.

Dan Chaon

#74. Does a human life, a "personality," exist as a single thread that can be followed through time? Is the "me" of 20 years ago the same "me" that exists now? Will I still be me in 20 years?

Dan Chaon

#75. 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.

Dan Chaon

#76. There is hardly anything at all. His life is suddenly a large, empty house, with each vacant room waiting to be furnished. His made-up wife. His invented father. His pretend childhood. He wonders if it is possible to unlie yourself.

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

#78. 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.

Dan Chaon

#79. It's hard to believe that this is how it's done. That this is how we get here into the world, by accident or design, the microscopic pieces of ourselves borne by fluids and blood and growing into a tiny kingdom of cells inside someone else's body It seems so difficult to become alive. So improbable.

Dan Chaon

#80. 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.

Dan Chaon

#81. worry knitting inside of him.

Dan Chaon

#82. 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.

Dan Chaon

#83. I guess I'm curious about how people process grief and how they process loss. And I'm also interested in the ways in which an event can have long-reaching consequences and a life over the course of years.

Dan Chaon

#84. Above the wrist? Or below the wrist?

Dan Chaon

#85. You know what you learn when you study the legal system? Poor people pass down damage the way rich people pass down an inheritance.

Dan Chaon

#86. Let us say that this, all of this, has a logic to it. We understand each other, don't we? Are we not, you and I, both of us spirits?
Reader, do not ask me who at this very moment is dreaming you.
Do not ask me when you are going to die.
Do not ask me where the gold is buried.

Dan Chaon

#87. I never could figure out how those people like Bukowski could be both carousers and writers at the same time, because to me writing takes as much destructive energy as it takes to be a really good professional drunk.

Dan Chaon

#88. 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.

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

#90. 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.

Dan Chaon

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

Dan Chaon

#92. I realized that I had the choice. I could give this moment a meaning, or I could choose to ignore it. It just depended on the kind of story I wanted to tell myself.

Dan Chaon

#93. Maybe love, like suffering, is relative.

Dan Chaon

#94. 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.

Dan Chaon

#95. 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.

Dan Chaon

#96. On the seat beside him, in between him and his father, Ryan's severed hand is resting on a bed of ice in an eight-quart Styrofoam cooler.

Dan Chaon

#97. 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.

Dan Chaon

#98. The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I'd heard, images, words, metaphors.

Dan Chaon

#99. 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.

Dan Chaon

#100. 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.

Dan Chaon