Ethan Canin Quotes
A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.
Ethan Canin
Quotes to Explore
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Maybe some people, when they sit down to write their great novel or make their great record or paint their great painting, they have it all planned out in their head. But for me, it's never worked that way.
Mike D
The Beastie Boys
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The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.
Karl Ove Knausgard
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Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.
Flannery O'Connor
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When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.
Louis Sachar
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In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.
Oscar Wilde
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I certainly wake up every morning and thank God that I'm not a novelist because the theater is tough, but novel writing is infinitely harder. Especially with the economics of serious fiction being what they are in America.
Tony Kushner
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Before I studied story, I was trying to write a novel, and it was terrible. It wasn't going anywhere, and I couldn't figure out what I was trying to do. It was really hard; much harder than I thought it was going to be. Now that I've studied story, I think I'd have a different approach and maybe I could actually get it done.
Donald Miller
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We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.
John Gardner
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History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.
Paul Auster
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There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.
Paul Auster
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When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.
William Nicholson
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My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.
Will Self
