170 Quotes by Dan Chaon

I keep a daily journal of whatever weird thought comes into my mind, like when I had a dream I was in North Dakota in the middle of a blizzard and for some reason the Egyptian pyramids were there, too – that I was able to shuffle into the book.

We are always telling stories to ourselves, about ourselves... But we can control those stories... I believe that! Events in our life have meaning because we choose to give it to them.

I know a lot of people don’t listen to music when they’re writing because it distracts them, but for me it’s almost a way to get into the self-hypnotic state that I need to be in to write.

I read a lot, but at the same time I’m not a particularly good or diligent or discriminating reader. I go through maybe close to a thousand or more books a year, but a lot of times I’ll only read bits and pieces of any one individual text.

Writing about women’s sexuality is very scary for me because I’m always afraid I’ll get it wrong.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down – it feels fatalistic in some way.

The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I’d heard, images, words, metaphors.

It had occurred to him that if the undead don’t realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.