Ethan Canin Quotes
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Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.
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Every time I'd sing or play piano when I was a child, my dad would yell up from the basement, 'That's B-flat!'
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I'm a craftsman type of teacher. I don't like the thematic type of teaching that takes place in a lot of colleges.
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Medicine ended up being the best thing I ever did for my writing.
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You know that thing people say, 'poetry is the hardest, stories are the second hardest, novels are the easiest?' I'm here to tell you that novels are the hardest. Writing a novel is unbelievably difficult. It's nightmarish.
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Point of view gets me. If I can feel like a character rather than a reader, I'll read that book.
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I finished 'America America,' and I knew I had to write another book, not just for personal reasons but because I had a contract.
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As I write, I try to be the character.
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I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.
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Feeling useful in medicine allows me to not feel so stupid when making up stories.
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It's such a risk to write a novel that it's easy to become conservative - you're spending what would be, for me, a couple of years of my life on a single idea. Which is maybe one of the reasons I write stories - if it doesn't work, you've only lost a month.
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I read for the sensation of becoming another person; I write for the same sensation.
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I've discovered over the years that being subject to both the adoration and the vilification actually makes me more disciplined. It makes me understand that it's the idea of writing a great book that propels me now, whereas it used to be the idea of success.
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In medical school, you're taught to write in this convoluted, Latinate way. I knew the vocabulary as well as anyone, but I would write kidney instead of nephric. I insisted on using English.
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I still don't know whether I know how to write a sentence.
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One of my favorite ways to find fictional inspiration, by the way, is to browse historical timelines. I also like world atlases - any country with a squiggly coastline seems to inspire me, as do visual dictionaries, those reclusive creatures of the reference shelf.
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In medicine, there's a fairly large but still finite body of knowledge that you need at hand for most of your daily work. It takes a few years to learn it, but once it's there, it's there. With writing, on the other hand, every new book - indeed, every new story - is a fresh and terrifying reinvention of everything.
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Medicine involves dealing with people who are going through changes and cycles, often people trapped in bodies that are going out from under them. Spending time with them lets you think their way, gives you insights as a writer.
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I no longer practice medicine, but I can say that, for me, medicine was easier - and certainly less emotionally turbulent - than writing.
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When I went for my medical school interview, I had an old paperback of 'Henderson the Rain King' in the pocket of my coat. I was wearing the best clothes I had - a pair of cords and a sport coat - but when I got to the office, all the other interviewees were lined up in their black suits.
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If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.
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You have to look at the value of different kinds of words. Adjectives weaken, and adverbs come even farther down the line. Verbs are strong; verbs and nouns.
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I think even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'
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I don't want to be movie-star famous. I want to move people with my writing.