Dan Chaon famous 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.
-- Dan Chaon

#Adventure #Car

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

#Thinking #Long #Goes On

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

#Hilarious #Peace #Tired

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

#Love #Dream #Memories

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

#Long #Premonition #Remembered

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

#Fun #Trying #Identity

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. It's sort of freeing: I can say I'm abandoning this thing that I hate forever and I'm moving on to something that's good. I'll find that I'll go back to [the other project] in a day or a week and like it again. But that moment of wanting to trash something -- that Virginia Woolf moment when you have to be stopped from filling your pocket with stones -- comes pretty regularly for me. Switching is probably a good thing.
-- Dan Chaon

#Hate #Moving #Virginia

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

#Mom #Running #Doors

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

#Mean #Perspective #Empathy

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

#Stories #World #Kind

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

#Character #Dark #Compassion

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

#Moving #Moving Forward #Alive

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

#Might #Realizing #Undead

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

#Life #Letting Go #Starting Over

It doesn't matter what you do. In the end, you are going to be judged, and all the times that you're not at your most dignified are the ones that will be recalled in all their vivid, heartbreaking detail. And then of course these things will be distorted and exaggerated and replayed over and over, until eventually they turn into the essence of you: your cartoon.
-- Dan Chaon

#Essence #Cartoon #Heartbreaking

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

#Being In Love #Differences #Acting

Maybe love, like suffering, is relative.
-- Dan Chaon

#Suffering #Relative

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

#Love You #Winning #Boys

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

#Lying #Littles #Way

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

#Mistake #Sleep #Eye

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

#Able #Found #Certain

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

#Sorry #Thinking #Talking

I never wanted to get to a point in my life where I knew what was going to happen next. I felt like most people just couldn't wait until they found themselves settled down into a routine and they didn't have to think about the next day, or the next year, or the next decade because it was all planned out for them. I can't understand how people can settle for having just one life.
-- Dan Chaon

#Thinking #Years #People

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

#Years #People #Twenties

How can you come to understand your life when even the beginning is so complicated: a single cell imprinted with the color of your eyes and the shape of your face the pattern on your palm and the moods that will shadow you through your life. How can you be alive when every choice you make breaks the world into a thousand filaments each careless step branching into long tributaries of alternate lives shuddering outward and outward like sheet lightning.
-- Dan Chaon

#Eye #Cells #Color

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

#Mirrors #Giving #Community

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

#Writing #People #Choices

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

#Parent #Different #Nebraska

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

#Media #Anecdotes #Attention

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

#Different #Three #Hops

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

#Reading #Kids #Psychosis

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

#Grief #Loss #Years

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

#Writing #Years #Punishment

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

#Kids #Wife #My Wife

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

#Memories #Self #Together

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

#Stories #Mystery #Short Story

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

#Eye #Thinking #Trying