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
I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
A novel requires a certain kind of world building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story… — 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
A lot of people work really diligently to maintain a "profile" in the writing world, but that's so hard, and so boring… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
I'd read an enormous amount but had spent so much time in my own head that I didn't have extensive social skills.… — 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
The danger in writing about a world you don't know very well is that you can get lost in it, and sometimes… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you… — 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 Image
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 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 or design,… — Dan Chaon Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
