Quote

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

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Dan Chaon
Age: 60
Novelist
Writer
Sidney
Nebraska
Must
Slips
Anyone
Point
Free
Found
Thought
Certain
Slip
Able
Loose

More quotes by Dan Chaon

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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
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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
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I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.
Dan Chaon
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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
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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
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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
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I think we're always in some ways writing to the teachers who gave us early love.
Dan Chaon
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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
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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
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Writing about women's sexuality is very scary for me because I'm always afraid I'll get it wrong.
Dan Chaon
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I don't think anybody deals well with tragedy or grief, but maybe my characters are particularly bad at it. Which is why I love them.
Dan Chaon
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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
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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
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One of the things I rarely do is write about sex.
Dan Chaon
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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
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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
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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
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You know, the biggest indicator of where you live is your income. If you live in this suburb you make this much money, and if you live in that suburb, you make that much money, and if you don't have any money you live where you're allowed to live.
Dan Chaon
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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
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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