Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Fiction is fun because you get to steal an identity and try to make it authentic.
Dan Chaon
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Dan Chaon
Age: 60
Novelist
Writer
Sidney
Nebraska
Trying
Make
Authentic
Steal
Stealing
Identity
Fiction
Fun
More quotes by 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 wanted to write a horror story. But in some ways, I have always thought of myself as a kind of ghost-story/horror writer, though most of the time the supernatural never actually appears on stage.
Dan Chaon
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
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 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
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
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
Writing about women's sexuality is very scary for me because I'm always afraid I'll get it wrong.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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 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.
Dan Chaon
I was worried that, as a college teacher, if I wrote too much about intergenerational sex my students would be creeped out.
Dan Chaon
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
One of the things I rarely do is write about sex.
Dan Chaon