170 Quotes by Dan Chaon

I have long admired Caroline Leavitt’s probing insight into people, her wit and compassion, her ability to find humor in dark situations, and conversely, her tenderness towards characters.

Here is the door of my mom’s house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.

I’ve never been able to sleep very much, even when I was a kid. I used to hate being forced to lay in bed in the darkness, and just shifting in bed and staring at the shadows.

You can’t count on notoriety lasting very long, and there’s no way to predict whether anyone will care about your books or you in three years, let alone ten or twenty.

You can’t tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn’t see.

A lot of people work really diligently to maintain a “profile” in the writing world, but that’s so hard, and so boring most of the time. So you just keep doing what you like to do, I guess, and try to enjoy it.

That’s how I work, whether with stories or novels – they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I’m walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.

You can recognize in your own reading habits what writers are doing that works and what doesn’t. I’m becoming much more aware of that after reading a decade of student stories.