Dan Chaon Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have to admit that most of the time I read in the same way that I smoke and chew gum and jiggle my leg a lot. 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. There are even certain works that are very important to me (Like Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, for example) that I probably haven't ever read all the way through from beginning to end, just certain passages over and over. I tend to read at stuff, rather that through it, if that makes any sense, and maybe there's something a little bit rodent-like about it, like a gerbil gnawing on woodchips in those, tiny, rapid obsessive bites. ~ Dan Chaon

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

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

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

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'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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

worry knitting inside of him. ~ Dan Chaon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 never understood why people from the 1980s thought there would be flying cars. It just seemed really dangerous and impractical to me, but they all talked about it, so it must have been a thing. Meanwhile, my dream for the future was that it wouldn't involve mass extinction and large-scale water shortages and cannibalism. ~ Dan Chaon

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

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

Plot was always secondary in my mind. ~ 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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

True grace is natural, not artificial, because, however strenuously you strive to gain it, when it is gained it never gives the impression of effort or straining for effect. ~ Frederic Dan Huntington

Come on," she said, smiling for the first time since she'd stepped on the plane. "We need to get to the bus before Ian plugs his iPod into the speakers."
Dan shuddered. "I'd rather face a thousand Vespers than listen to Beethoven. ~ Clifford Riley

For all of us, it's very hard to think about money, and because of that, we need help. In the same way that for all of us, it is hard to eat well, and we need some help. The poor have a particular challenge, which is that their life is actually much more complex - and they're much more complex cognitively. ~ Dan Ariely

As we're bombarded daily with new ads for pills, diets and ab-doers, we have to protect our wallets and our time. ~ Dan John

The world of publishing is in crisis. It's no coincidence that the worst published writer in the world today is also one of the world's most successful writers ... Dan Brown. Now Dan Brown is not a good writer, The Da Vinci Code is not literature. Dan Brown writes sentences like "The famous man looked at the red cup." ... and it's only to be hoped that Dan Brown never gets a job where he's required to break bad news. "Doctor is he going to be alright?" "The seventy five year old man died a painful death on the large green table ... it was sad". ~ Stewart Lee

I had long assumed that ceaseless planning was the recipe for effectiveness, but Marturano's point was that too much mental churning was counterproductive. When you lurch from one thing to the next, constantly scheming, or reacting to incoming fire, the mind gets exhausted. You get sloppy and make bad decisions. I could see how the counterintuitive act of stopping, even for a few seconds, could be a source of strength, not weakness. ~ Dan Harris

My underwear is my own person buisness. ~ Dan Miller

Everything we've seen is deeply disturbing, but we cannot ignore these chondrules. The evidence in favor is conclusive, while the evidence against is circumstantial. ~ Dan Brown

Let us adopt a symbologist approach to our subjects and see whether there are any invisible connections buried just beneath the surface. One anagram of "Herman Melville, Moby Dick" would be "Hmm-- a credible milky novel." Shuffle the letters of "Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code", and we uncover this message: "B. was a contrived, hidden con." And rearranging "Andy Miller-- The Year of Reading Dangerously" proves what we have suspected for a while: "I am only a greying fatheaded Surrey nerd-- LOL."
Dr. Langdon may be onto something. ~ Andy Miller

[A lesser light asked Ummon Are there multiple futures> Ummon answered Does a dog have fleas>] ~ Dan Simmons

They drove towards the city and Dan handed Lyssa a loose Hermes scarf.
'Yours?' she teased.
'Mum's,' he answered as Lyssa tied it over her eyes. 'You look very sexy like that.'
'And you sound really creepy right now,' Lyssa said, laughing. ~ Kate Forster

That's what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks' thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man's way of getting a foot in the Void Which Binds' front door. Aenea knew that. You should have too. ~ Dan Simmons

Could I stop myself? Once I tore that wall down, could I rebuild it? Did ~ Dan Wells

Basic atheism is not a belief. It is the lack of belief. There is a difference between believing there is no god and not believing there is a god - both are atheistic, though popular usage has ignored the latter. ~ Dan Barker

I said, you fuckfaced shitstain," - his words were low, slow, measured - "get the fuck away from her, or I will fucking fuckily fuck you the fuck up."

I stared at Dan, my lips parting in wonder. He'd just used some variation of the F-word as a noun, verb, adverb, and adjective all in one sentence. I didn't know whether to be mortified or impressed. ~ Penny Reid

Your fears are not walls, but hurdles. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the conquering of it. ~ Dan Millman

At sunrise of the third day, I saw the corpse's chest begin to rise and fall and I heard the first intake of breath - a rasp like water being poured into a leather pouch. ~ Dan Simmons