Chaon Quotes & Sayings

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

It's very hard - weirdly hard - to clear your mind of all that crap so that you can just sit down and write and find that place where you're just involved and enjoying the imaginary place you've discovered. All the other "problems" with writing are just puzzles, and they can be interesting to try to crack, even when it's frustrating. — Dan Chaon

This was what real grief felt like - she had never truly felt it before. All the times she had been sad, all the times she had wept in her life, all the glooms and melancholies were merely moods, mere passing whims. Grief was a different thing altogether. — Dan Chaon

For the last few years I've tried to force myself to write at least one page every day, which doesn't sound like much but it's actually pretty hard to manage. Because I'm not allowed to do a make-up day. I can't do two pages the next day. The punishment for not completing my page is that I have to eat a vegetarian meal the next day. — Dan Chaon

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

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

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

Outside, the sleet had gotten thicker. You could hear it pebbling against the large glass windows, you could see it swirling wildly through the spotlights of street lamps. It was the kind of night when you might expect to see a skeleton flying through the air, its ragged black shroud flapping in the wind. — Dan Chaon

I can't understand how people can settle for having just one life. I remember we were in English class and we were talking about that poem by - that one guy. David Frost. 'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood-' You know this poem, right? 'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth-"
"I loved that poem. But I remember thinking to myself: Why? How come you can't travel both? That seemed really unfair to me. — Dan Chaon

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

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

Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up would make sense. He closes his eyes tightly. His life wasn't always a mistake, he thinks, and he breathes uncertainly for awhile, trying to find a pathway into unconsciousness, into sleep. — Dan Chaon

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person. — Dan Chaon

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

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

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

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

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

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

I started out as a poet who primarily wanted to write about image and moment. Over the years I've been trying to teach myself how to do plot and scene. My first story collection had the most issues with the plotlessness, and when I was writing my second collection I was teaching myself how to make things happen. — Dan Chaon

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

I think that the way that I write stories is by instinct. You have some basic ideas - a character, or an image, or a situation that sounds compelling - and then you just feel your way around until you find the edges of your story. It's like going into a dark room ... you stumble around until you find the walls and then inch your way to the light switch. — Dan Chaon

It's not like it ruined my life, I was going to say, but then I didn't. Because it occurred to me that maybe it had ruined my life, in a kind of quiet way
a little lie, probably not so vital, insidiously separating me from everyone I loved. — Dan Chaon

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

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

I'd read an enormous amount but had spent so much time in my own head that I didn't have extensive social skills. Suddenly I was in this world where I was surrounded by these incredibly polished and wealthy kids who had gone to prep schools, and I felt daunted by them. I don't think people were aware of how full of anxiety I was ... For a long time I felt like I was living in a place where I shouldn't have been. — Dan Chaon

The pirates would kiss Hayden, and sometimes they would cut off a hank of hair - 'as a reminder of yer kisses, me lad' - and one of them even cut off a piece of his earlobe.
This particular pirate was Bill McGregor, and he was the one Hayden feared the most. Bill McGregor was the worst of them - and at night when everyone else was asleep, Bill McGregor would come looking for Hayden, his step slow and hollow on the planks of the deck, his voice a deep whisper.
Boy,' he would murmur. 'where are you, boy?'
After Bill McGregor cut off the piece of Hayden's earlobe, he decided that he wanted more. Every time he caught Hayden, he would cut a small piece off of him. The skin of an elbow, the tip of a finger, a piece of his lip. He would grip the squirming Hayden and cut a piece off of him, and then Bill McGregor would eat the piece of flesh. — Dan Chaon

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

I have to admit that 'Psychology Today' was one of the first magazines I started reading, back when I was 13 or 14, because I was the kind of kid that was curious about the mysterious human mind - I hoped to learn about telekenisis, multiple personalities, psychosis, and various other cool and terrible things that happened inside people's heads. — Dan Chaon

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

Beth had been a middle school science teacher and Joni was a librarian and they both had collections of weird stuff they had found. Bizarre, misspelled letters written by lovelorn eighth graders. Obscene Polaroids left in between the pages of library books. They used to call each other on the phone to share their latest discovery, and Critter had always remained a little off to the side, never feeling quite as sharp or ironic as they were. Critter was an electrician, primarily home repair, and so he didn't usually come across anything except bad wiring and faulty lighting fixtures. — Dan Chaon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if you believed that everything in life was like a prize? What if you thought of the world as a big random drawing, and you were always winning things, the world offering them up with a big grin, like an emcee's: Here you go, Hollis. Here is a motorcycle. Here is a little boy who loves you. Here is a weird experience, here is something bad that you should mull over because it will make you a better person. What if you could think that life was this free vacation you'd won, and you won just because you happened to be alive? — Dan Chaon

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

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

In these journals I would frequently write messages to myself, a person whom I addressed as Big Me, or The Future Me. Rereading these entries as the addressee, I try not to be insulted, since my former self admonishes me frequently. "I hope you are not a failure," he says. "I hope you are happy," he says. — Dan Chaon

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

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

There are little wisps of jelly in a living brain. Deagle knows this well: neurons, transmitting signals - and the soul, so to speak, is somewhere in those flashes. He heard once on a science program that the spindle cell - present in humans, whales, some apes, elephants - may be at the heart of what we call our "selves."
What we recognize in the mirror - that thread we follow through time that we call "me"? It's just a diatom, a paramecium, a bit of ganglia that branches and shudders assertively. A brief brain orgasm, like lightning.
In short, it's all chemicals. You can regiment it easily enough: fluoxetine, sertraline, paroxetine, escitalopram, citalopram - the brain can be washed clean, and you can reset yourself, Ctrl+Alt+Del. You don't have to be a prisoner of your memories and emotions. — Dan Chaon

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

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

I've been reading Peter Straub since I was a teenager, and his work is hardwired into my brain. A Dark Matter contains echoes of all that has been great about Straub's previous work and builds upon it. This Rashomon-like tale is as spooky and frightening as anything he has written, but it's also an intense and moving celebration of love. Out of the darkness comes, ultimately, a surprising and haunting sense of joy. — Dan Chaon

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

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

If no one knows you, then you are no one. — Dan Chaon

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

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

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

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

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

The first time she had tried to kill herself, she had intuited that there was no escape. She had seen, with sudden clarity, that her life was a series of boxes, a maze that she would run and run through and never find an exit, and she thought, almost peacefully, I don't want it. I don't want my life. — Dan Chaon

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

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

What happened to us? It was a question that interested her. Most people seemed to believe that they were experts of their own life story. They had a set of memories that they strung like beads, and this necklace told a sensible tale. But she suspected that most of these stories would fall apart under strict examination--that, in fact, we were only peeping through a keyhole of our lives, and the majority of the truth, the reality of what happened to us, was hidden. Memories were no more solid than dreams...What happened to us? She drew smoke, considering the question. Was it possible that we would never really know? What if we were not, actually, the curators of our own lives? — Dan Chaon

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

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

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

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

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

How good it felt to be alone, stacking blocks. That's what came to him again, a kind of weight solidifying in his chest: how much he had loved to be alone - to be outside of his own life, a giant, sentient cloud looming over his imaginary city, hovering above it. There was a certain kind of blank omniscience that felt like his true self, at last. — Dan Chaon

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

Anxiety!" he said. "I've been there, plenty of times! And, you know, it's particularly hard during the first one, especially, because you're so invested in that idea of self. You grew up with that concept - you think there's a real you - and you have some longstanding attachments, people you've known, and you start to think about them. — Dan Chaon

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

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

What if she never knows the end of the story? She shudders, and her mind continues to lurch forward into the future, that simple expectation of time passing - another moment, and another moment. It seems impossible that it will abruptly cease. It seems impossible that you will never know what happens next, that the thread you've been following your whole life will just ... cut off, like a book with the last pages torn out. That doesn't seem fair, she thinks. — Dan Chaon

Her name ... was Mrs. marina Orlova, and she had grown up in Siberia. Later, she would tell him that she loathed the American custom of constantly smiling: "They are like chimpanzees," she said, in her bitter exclamatory voice. She grimaced, baring her teeth grotesquely. "Eee!" she said. "I smile at you! Eee! It is repulsive. — Dan Chaon

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

Above the wrist? Or below the wrist? — Dan Chaon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their house was about a mile outside of town. The kids would play outdoors, in the backyard and the large stubble field behind the house. Dusk seemed to last for hours, and when it was finally dark they would sit under the porch light, catching thickly buzzing June bugs and moths, or even an occasional toad who hopped into the circle of light, tempted by the halo of insects that floated around the bare orange lightbulb next to the front door — Dan Chaon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

worry knitting inside of him. — Dan Chaon

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

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

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

Hesitantly, I touched the stump where my finger used to be. In my mind, something almost remembered itself, but the fumes of turpentine were making me a little lightheaded; whatever memory was on the verge of coughing itself up was gone even before it materialized. Out the window, I could see a squirrel was stumbling erratically around in circles underneath the old basketball net. Then I realized that it wasn't a squirrel; it was a brown paper bag. — Dan Chaon

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

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

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