Ethan Canin Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
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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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I think most fiction focuses on uncomfortable settings because that's interesting.
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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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Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.
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I think it is important to stay open to the world around you, so that you are constantly in a state of growth and evolution, which can only happen through inspiration.
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I'm not saying I talk to cartoon characters all the time, but the characters are very real to me. In a very non-insane way.
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Ferrari gives you a special feeling.
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When I do a workshop, there is always at least one author who comes up afterward and asks if I'll take a look at his or her book and consider blurbing it. For some reason, I can turn someone down in e-mail, but when he or she is looking me in the eye, I cave.
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If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.
