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 w…

- Dan Chaon

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.

- Dan Chaon

You can go on like this for a very long time, and no one will notice. You keep thinking you're going to hit some sort of bottom, but I'm here to tell…

- Dan Chaon

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

- Dan Chaon

Fiction is fun because you get to steal an identity and try to make it authentic.

- Dan Chaon

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

- Dan Chaon

Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.

- Dan Chaon

The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my wife and kids.

- Dan Chaon

Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up wou…

- Dan Chaon