170 Quotes by Dan Chaon

In the end, there probably isn’t much difference between being in love and acting like you’re in love.

Identity issues are hardwired into the way I think about character – it’s almost as if I can’t get away from them even if I want to.

The true terror Jonah thought the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die but that we were all born that we were all once little babies like this unknowing and slowly reeling in the world gathering it loop by loop like a ball of string. The true terror was that we once didn’t exist and then through no fault of our own we had to.

I usually have more than one thing I’m working on at once – I’ve been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth.

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...

I never understood why people from the 1980s thought there would be flying cars. It just seemed really dangerous and impractical to me, but they all talked about it, so it must have been a thing. Meanwhile, my dream for the future was that it wouldn’t involve mass extinction and large-scale water shortages and cannibalism.

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.

On the seat beside him, in between him and his father, Ryan’s severed hand is resting on a bed of ice in an eight-quart Styrofoam cooler.

There’s a lot of effort expended once you begin to completely trash your life. Sometimes, writing feels like this to me.