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Fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition, small disappointed hope.
Ethan Canin -
You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.
Ethan Canin
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'How does your life turn out?' That's the ultimate novelistic question to me.
Ethan Canin -
It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.
Ethan Canin -
A ten- or twelve-page story seems too easy, which is a funny thing to say considering that writing a decent short story is devastatingly difficult. Yet it still seems easier than a novel. You can turn a short story on a single good line - ten pages of decent writing and one good moment.
Ethan Canin -
You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.
Ethan Canin -
Books were king, but now movies are king, and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live.
Ethan Canin -
I teach a 14-week semester, and one of the things I do when I have to teach literature is, for the first half hour of the class, I have the students write the beginning of a new story every week. At the end of the semester, even if they have learned nothing about literature, at least they'll have 14 beginnings that they can take with them.
Ethan Canin
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In the winter, I read next to a wood-burning stove. In the summer, we have a place up in Michigan where I like to read in a hammock. It's almost entirely hidden by cedar trees and right up by the water. You can climb in there and see nothing but water and be seen by nobody. It's perfect.
Ethan Canin -
A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.
Ethan Canin -
Your first book is kind of a labor of ignorance. You don't realize the difficulty of it. Your second book is sort of a labor of fear. Then you sort of either hit a stride, or you don't.
Ethan Canin -
I can only remember two books from college that moved me: E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'
Ethan Canin -
If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.
Ethan Canin -
Politicians are already exaggerated. They're bigger than life in every way - their appetites, their ambitions, their personalities, their failings, their magnetism. In a sense, they're made for fiction.
Ethan Canin
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Families tend to artificially divide the world, imbuing one member with all the attributes and another with all the faults. But it's never that way.
Ethan Canin -
I started out writing stories because that's all I wanted to read, but now I don't know if I'll ever write one again.
Ethan Canin -
I'm fascinated by power, by those that can be publicly generous and privately ruthless.
Ethan Canin -
I like to write about the moment of light in the hour of darkness.
Ethan Canin -
When I write, I can become this ecstatic, crazy fellow, hearing the voices and just loosening up and letting them grow.
Ethan Canin -
I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.
Ethan Canin
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I don't think success makes one confident. I think it has more to do with character than circumstance.
Ethan Canin -
Mathematicians don't like it when they're associated with mental illness and sort of bristle when you say that they can't get along socially, that they're not good with people.
Ethan Canin -
The only successful way to write, and the only one I have found, is to be the character. Give up on trying to control them. Writers always talk about hearing voices. That's what they mean.
Ethan Canin -
There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.
Ethan Canin