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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

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Dan Chaon
Age: 60
Novelist
Writer
Sidney
Nebraska
World
Else
Oddly
Find
Asleep
Enough
Isolation
Feel
Loneliness
Writing
Empty
Kind
Ways
Love
Everybody
Like
Write

More quotes by Dan Chaon

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You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.
Dan Chaon
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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.
Dan Chaon
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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.
Dan Chaon
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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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I was worried that, as a college teacher, if I wrote too much about intergenerational sex my students would be creeped out.
Dan Chaon
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The kind of person I find myself interested in is a cross between being very emotionally complex and very immature. That's what I felt I was like when I was younger.
Dan Chaon
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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.
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.
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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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 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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In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love.
Dan Chaon
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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.
Dan Chaon
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I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.
Dan Chaon
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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
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One of the things I rarely do is write about sex.
Dan Chaon
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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
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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.
Dan Chaon
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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.
Dan Chaon
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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