Quotes from Dan Chaon

I believe that! Events in our life have meaning because we choose to give it to them.

But maybe it was just a sort of Bluebeard's wife thing. You can't help yourself: Open the door, you stupid bitch. Go ahead.

There's a lot of bad influences in Cleveland, I'm starting to think. It's a shithole, you know? I think if I'd been born in a nicer place I wouldn't be such a fuckup.

I can't tolerate cell phones," I say. "For health reasons." "Yech," he grunts. "Those things ruined the country. I don't know how, but they convinced the people that they should spend their whole lives inside a screen the size of a playing card. I'd take a jail cell over that bullshit any time.

I realized," he'd say. "I realized that I had the choice. I could give this moment a meaning, or I could choose to ignore it. It just depended on the kind of story I wanted to tell myself.

We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves," he'd say. Sometimes he would make a gesture that was almost like a touch, though he actually rarely made skin-to-skin contact. "But we can control those stories," he'd say. "I believe that! Events in our life have meaning because we choose to give it to them.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

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

Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.

For the last few years I've tried to force myself to write at least one page every day, which doesn't sound like much but it's actually pretty hard to manage. Because I'm not allowed to do a make-up day. I can't do two pages the next day. The punishment for not completing my page is that I have to eat a vegetarian meal the next day.

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.

There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything.

A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.

It doesn't matter what you do. In the end, you are going to be judged, and all the times that you're not at your most dignified are the ones that will be recalled in all their vivid, heartbreaking detail. And then of course these things will be distorted and exaggerated and replayed over and over, until eventually they turn into the essence of you: your cartoon.

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 you: There is no bottom.

There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?

How can you come to understand your life when even the beginning is so complicated: a single cell imprinted with the color of your eyes and the shape of your face the pattern on your palm and the moods that will shadow you through your life. How can you be alive when every choice you make breaks the world into a thousand filaments each careless step branching into long tributaries of alternate lives shuddering outward and outward like sheet lightning.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

We leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years

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 would make sense. He closes his eyes tightly. His life wasn't always a mistake, he thinks, and he breathes uncertainly for awhile, trying to find a pathway into unconsciousness, into sleep.

I never wanted to get to a point in my life where I knew what was going to happen next. I felt like most people just couldn't wait until they found themselves settled down into a routine and they didn't have to think about the next day, or the next year, or the next decade because it was all planned out for them. I can't understand how people can settle for having just one life.

It's not like it ruined my life, I was going to say, but then I didn't. Because it occurred to me that maybe it had ruined my life, in a kind of quiet way--a little lie, probably not so vital, insidiously separating me from everyone I loved.

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

So this was what it felt like to lose yourself. Again. To let go of your future and let it rise up and up until finally you couldn't see it anymore, and you knew that you had to start over.