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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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Dan Chaon
Age: 60
Novelist
Writer
Sidney
Nebraska
Anymore
Life
Couldn
Like
Lose
Loses
Knew
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Future
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More quotes by Dan Chaon
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
In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love.
Dan Chaon
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
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
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
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
The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my wife and kids.
Dan Chaon
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
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
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
You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.
Dan Chaon
Writing about women's sexuality is very scary for me because I'm always afraid I'll get it wrong.
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
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.
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 love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.
Dan Chaon
I guess I've been blessed with insomnia because I do a lot of my writing at night. Because I don't sleep as much as I probably should, I have that extra time to write weird stories and think odd thoughts.
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
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