Top 80 Dan Chaon Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “And he saw now that it wasn’t real. That it had never been real. He could feel that other life shrinking and losing its possibility, and he knew that it was something that he should never, ever, think of again.”

— Dan Chaon

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

— Dan Chaon

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Dan Chaon

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Dan Chaon

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “I think we’re always in some ways writing to the teachers who gave us early love.”

— Dan Chaon

78. “When I was younger I was attracted to people who had that kind of artifice – people who were incredibly polished and had a complex persona that always seemed to be turned on. I was really interested in these kinds of people because I felt so unformed...”

— Dan Chaon

79. “Plot was always secondary in my mind.”

— Dan Chaon

80. “It was disconcerting to live in a time in which accepting reality required a suspension of disbelief.”

— Dan Chaon

81. “We see things not as they are, but as we are. Because it is the ‘I’ behind the ‘eye’ that does the seeing.”

— Dan Chaon

82. “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

83. “He was surprised at how useless his mind was.”

— Dan Chaon