Ethan Canin Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.
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I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
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Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.
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A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
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I love science fiction.
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If utopian fiction became the new trend, I wouldn't read it.
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Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.
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If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
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The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.
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In really, really good science fiction, the line between the science and the fiction is blurry.
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The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
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I believe humankind has looked at Climate Change in that same way: as if it were a fiction, happening to someone else’s planet, as if pretending that Climate Change wasn’t real would somehow make it go away.
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I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.
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Anyone can write a specification, but if nobody implements it, what is it but a particularly dry form of science fiction.
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The biggest problem in the fictional treatment of sex is that it's not treated as part of the story but as a pause from the story. The best sex scenes in fiction are the ones that advance the story.
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Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.
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Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
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I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.
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People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.
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I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
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Do not entertain hopes for realization, but practice all your life.
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I struggled in school. Math and science were difficult for me. But I can watch 10 guys play, and I can tell you what everybody did. It might be a curse because when you see everything, sometimes you don't let your kids play.
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If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.
