170 Quotes by Dan Chaon

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

I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn’t you think so? Doesn’t it seem like houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing their hair in the street? I never – I never thought it would be this small, did you?

People write fiction in their minds all the time – every time we read a ‘human interest’ news story, or a true crime tale, we find ourselves fascinated because we’re trying to understand why people behave the way they do, why they make the choices they do, how we become who we become.

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.

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.

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.

This was what real grief felt like – she had never truly felt it before. All the times she had been sad, all the times she had wept in her life, all the glooms and melancholies were merely moods, mere passing whims. Grief was a different thing altogether.

It’s not like it ruined my life, I was going to say, but then I didn’t. Because it occurred to me that maybe it had ruined my life, in a kind of quiet way – a little lie, probably not so vital, insidiously separating me from everyone I loved.

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.