Dan Chaon Quotes

I'm insatiably curious about human nature. I feel very lucky that as a writer I get to learn so much about it just to do my job right.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature.

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior.

The thing that I love is human behavior - why people do what they do, who they are, and the choices that they make - and that has to always be plot driven.

I write because I have always been curious about what it would feel like to be someone else, in a different situation. Fiction is a wonderful way of exploring that.

What I loved about the acting class was that you got to think all day long about a person that wasn't you, and figure out why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed.

I'm constantly surprised by human nature and humanity. And I think that's why I love what I do: because I love to story-tell and bring new characters to life.

Novels are . . . an unsurpassed form to understand people.

I feel my job as an actor is to explore all sides of humanity.

Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?

The reason you want to act is to continue to explore every different part of the human psyche.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

I'm interested in stories and the dark side of peoples' minds.

The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor?

I had begun to write novels because of a fierce, self-serving impulse in my own heart. I had not considered the potential in a book for felt communion, the bright largesse of intimately participating in the lives of other people.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

I kind of stumbled into acting, even though I've always been fascinated by people and kind of their motives, and it's been amazing to me, everything I read before about psychology, philosophy, just to put it into practice somehow.

The reason I act is because I'm trying to understand why people are as they are.

Besides, most of the books I like involve people I could never play in a million years.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.