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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'The Wire' really drew on a lot of real-life situations and real-life organizations - it created fiction to make a social statement about reality.
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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 wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.
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Me, I have a science fiction writer's conviction that the damn robot is supposed to speak human, not the other way around.
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As for what I have done as a poet, I take no pride in whatever. Excellent poets have lived at the same time with me, poets more excellent lived before me, and others will come after me. But that in my country I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of colors-of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here have a consciousness of superiority to many.
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Lionel Essrog, the twitching, barking, gabbling narrator of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, 'Motherless Brooklyn,' is no movie-of-the-week novelty grafted onto a noir mystery. Maybe his Tourette's is a gimmick, but it's a gimmick with depth, with soul.
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I spent twelve years training for a career that was over in a week. Joe Namath spent one week training for a career that lasted twelve years.
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If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.
