170 Quotes by Dan Chaon

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.

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.

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.

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.

Plot was always secondary in my mind.

I knew I wanted to play around with genre-esque imagery, and the identity theft stuff came in the middle, when I was figuring out how the characters were connected to those images.

For me, the process of writing a novel happens mostly in your head before you actually start writing.

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

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.