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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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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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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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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I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.
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History is an agreed-upon fiction.
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The goal in blogging/ business/ inspiring non-fiction is to share a truth, or at least a truth as the writer sees it. To not just share it, but to spread it and to cause change to happen. You can do that in at least three ways: with research (your own or reporting on others), by building and describing conceptual structures, or with stories that resonate.
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I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.
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If we go out there, and we play well and win football games, all the good stuff will come with it. It's not my job to worry about something I can't control.
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Women in the public eye and on TV are often scrutinized for how they look so I know how easy it would be to fall into the trap of taking on board this negativity. The healthiest way for me to deal with it is by being fit and healthy through activities like swimming, which helps me focus on what my body can do rather than what it looks like.
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If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.
