Top 80 Dan Chaon Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Dan Chaon

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “You can’t tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.”

— Dan Chaon

6. “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

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

— Dan Chaon

8. “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

9. “Maybe love, like suffering, is relative.”

— Dan Chaon

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

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

— Dan Chaon

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

21. “If no one knows you, then you are no one.”

— Dan Chaon

22. “My main reader was my wife Sheila, and I haven’t written a lot since she died.”

— 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. “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

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

— Dan Chaon

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “The true terror Jonah thought the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die but that we were all born that we were all once little babies like this unknowing and slowly reeling in the world gathering it loop by loop like a ball of string. The true terror was that we once didn’t exist and then through no fault of our own we had to.”

— Dan Chaon

33. “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

34. “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

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

— Dan Chaon

Featured in: Fun Quotes

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

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

— Dan Chaon

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

— Dan Chaon

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

45. “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

46. “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

47. “Above the wrist? Or below the wrist?”

— Dan Chaon

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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