Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Dan Chaon
Age: 60
Novelist
Writer
Sidney
Nebraska
Feels
Outsiders
Really
Theme
Way
Identity
Always
Fiction
Feeling
Feelings
Hardwired
Anything
Autobiographical
Feel
Outsider
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
I was worried that, as a college teacher, if I wrote too much about intergenerational sex my students would be creeped out.
Dan Chaon
Fiction is fun because you get to steal an identity and try to make it authentic.
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
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
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
I guess I'm curious about how people process grief and how they process loss. And I'm also interested in the ways in which an event can have long-reaching consequences and a life over the course of years.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my wife and kids.
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
One of the things I rarely do is write about sex.
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
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