170 Quotes by Dan Chaon

Their house was about a mile outside of town. The kids would play outdoors, in the backyard and the large stubble field behind the house. Dusk seemed to last for hours, and when it was finally dark they would sit under the porch light, catching thickly buzzing June bugs and moths, or even an occasional toad who hopped into the circle of light, tempted by the halo of insects that floated around the bare orange lightbulb next to the front door.

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.

I think we’re always in some ways writing to the teachers who gave us early love.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else’s eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven’t actually experienced.

Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they’re the building blocks of what makes a story work.

The people who control this country are the real gangsters. You know that, right? And if you play by their rules, you’re nothing but their slave.

In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I’m having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books.

Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it’s like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.

This is one of those things that you can never explain to anyone; that’s what I want to explain – one of those free-association moments with connections that dissolve when you start to try to put them into words.