Dan Chaon quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Dan Chaon on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Above the wrist? Or below the wrist?

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

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

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

worry knitting inside of him.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe love, like suffering, is relative.

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

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.

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

Plot was always secondary in my mind.

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