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My main reader was my wife Sheila, and I haven't written a lot since she died.

Dan Chaon

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Dan Chaon
Age: 60
Novelist
Writer
Sidney
Nebraska
Written
Sheila
Main
Havens
Haven
Died
Reader
Wife
Since

More quotes by Dan Chaon

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One of the things I rarely do is write about sex.
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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.
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I was worried that, as a college teacher, if I wrote too much about intergenerational sex my students would be creeped out.
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Fiction is fun because you get to steal an identity and try to make it authentic.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Writing about women's sexuality is very scary for me because I'm always afraid I'll get it wrong.
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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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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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Plot was always secondary in my mind.
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