I tend to like order in almost every other aspect of my life, but for me, the process of writing is really… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
“You really romanticize the white-trash period of your life,' Rain once said to me, which I thought was a little hurtful but… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
“The circumstances of life-the events of life-the people around me in life-do not make me the way I am. They reveal the… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
There's a lot of effort expended once you begin to completely trash your life. Sometimes, writing feels like this to me. — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my wife and kids. — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
“There is hardly anything at all. His life is suddenly a large, empty house, with each vacant room waiting to be furnished.… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
“The desire to remake that shrinking expanse of life they were still allotted, to make use of it, to fill it up… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
“The first time she had tried to kill herself, she had intuited that there was no escape. She had seen, with sudden… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
It's not like it ruined my life, I was going to say, but then I didn't. Because it occurred to me that… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
So this was what it felt like to lose yourself. Again. To let go of your future and let it rise up… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
Julie Orringer is the real thing, a breathtaking chronicler of the secrets and cruelties underneath the surface of middle-class American life. These… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
I never wanted to get to a point in my life where I knew what was going to happen next. I felt… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
How can you come to understand your life when even the beginning is so complicated: a single cell imprinted with the color… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
“The true terror Jonah thought the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die but that we… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
What if you believed that everything in life was like a prize? What if you thought of the world as a big… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
“There are little wisps of jelly in a living brain. Deagle knows this well: neurons, transmitting signals - and the soul, so… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
“It's hard to believe that this is how it's done. That this is how we get here into the world, by accident… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life.… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
“Does a human life, a "personality," exist as a single thread that can be followed through time? Is the "me" of 20… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
I've had a lot of different lives. I was adopted, I grew up in Nebraska, and then I went to Northwestern... Then… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future. — Dan Chaon Copy Share
For the last few years I've tried to force myself to write at least one page every day, which doesn't sound like much but… — Dan Chaon Copy Share
“It's hard to believe that this is how it's done. That this is how we get here into the world, by accident or design,… — Dan Chaon Copy Share
I also have just my own limits about stuff. I'm not interested in writing graphically about sexual assault for example. I feel like the… — Dan Chaon Copy Share
“I have to admit that most of the time I read in the same way that I smoke and chew gum and jiggle my… — Dan Chaon Copy Share
“Outside, the sleet had gotten thicker. You could hear it pebbling against the large glass windows, you could see it swirling wildly through the… — Dan Chaon Copy Share
I was worried that, as a college teacher, if I wrote too much about intergenerational sex my students would be creeped out. — Dan Chaon Copy Share
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 Copy Share
“I've been talking to myself a lot lately. I don't know what that's about, but my mother was the same way. She hated to… — Dan Chaon Copy Share
“Your Mom's Car. Think about that. Try to wrap your brain around the supernatural and spiritual implications that the name bears down you. Your… — Dan Chaon Copy Share
“He pictures amputated human arms flopping like fish down the center of the road; syringes floating on beds of liposuctioned fat; gelatinous human eyeballs… — Dan Chaon Copy Share
“In the basement of Sydney's new house is a little room that is about the size and shape of a coffin.” — Dan Chaon Copy Share
“It’s called apophenia. It’s the tendency we humans have to find meaning in disconnected information. For example, some people believe in what’s called the… — Dan Chaon Copy Share
