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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

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Dan Chaon
Age: 60
Novelist
Writer
Sidney
Nebraska
People
Twenties
Leave
Tell
Trail
Become
Trails
Body
Teens
Many
Abandon
Hard
Versions
Years
Bodies

More quotes by Dan Chaon

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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.
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One of the things I rarely do is write about sex.
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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.
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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.
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There are all kinds of strange threads in American culture, and places where sympathy is extended and places where it isn't, and places where outrage is extended and places where it's not. It's this constantly shifting barrel of eels.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The thing that made me turn more towards writing was realizing how hard it was going to be to get a singular vision on film and how much more control I would have if I were writing novels.
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The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my wife and kids.
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In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love.
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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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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.
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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
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Fiction is fun because you get to steal an identity and try to make it authentic.
Dan Chaon
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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.
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I think at a certain point the book develops a certain weight, or pressure. You've been pushing the rock up the hill for a long time and then it starts to roll and things do start to come together in the last two thirds.
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Writing short stories was kind of like I was cheating the whole time, in some way. I went back and forth between writing the novels and sort of sneaking out to work on stories occasionally. These stories were written over the last 10 years or so, as I was taking breaks from the novels I've written.
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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
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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