Dan Chaon
Dan Chaon
Dan Chaon is an American writer. He is the author of three short story collections and two novels, including Among the Missing, which was a 2001 finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon's stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing and Literature...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
adventure car verge
There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything.
hilarious peace humor
A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.
teacher writing thinking
I think we're always in some ways writing to the teachers who gave us early love.
moving-forward moving alive
Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.
years people teens
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?
eye cells color
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.
sorry thinking talking
I can't understand how people can settle for having just one life. I remember we were in English class and we were talking about that poem by - that one guy. David Frost. 'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood-' You know this poem, right? 'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth-" "I loved that poem. But I remember thinking to myself: Why? How come you can't travel both? That seemed really unfair to me.
being-in-love differences acting
In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love.
mistake sleep eye
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.
writing people trying
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.
essence cartoon heartbreaking
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.
different three hops
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.
media attention news
I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call 'contemporary headline horror,' stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news.
parent different nebraska
I've had a lot of different lives. I was adopted, I grew up in Nebraska, and then I went to Northwestern... Then I had this really extraordinary, different life than my parents.