Ethan Canin Quotes
Medicine involves dealing with people who are going through changes and cycles, often people trapped in bodies that are going out from under them. Spending time with them lets you think their way, gives you insights as a writer.
Quotes to Explore
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What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
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I am not an autobiographical writer.
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Remember that life's big changes rarely give advance warning.
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I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.
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Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief, causes me to research and learn, helps me to understand people and grow.
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Security... it's simply the recognition that changes will take place and the knowledge that you're willing to deal with whatever happens.
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It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
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Every writer uses his own way to motivate oneself.
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What I look for in any book is an argument, based on evidence, that changes the way I think about something important.
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I had learned of Gertrude Stein's bon mot that medicine opened all doors. This prompted me, in different moods, to view my future life as literary psychiatrist, globe-trotting tropical disease specialist, or academic internist.
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I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.
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I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.
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I've never experienced writer's block. When it's going really well, my body temperature goes up, and I'm flushed. I get quite delirious.
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Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.
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I didn't know how to be a writer. But I thought, 'I can do this.'
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It's a big, big advantage because understanding what changes we might make takes time and it takes time to work out settings and to understand everything about the new machine.
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I didn't invent forensic science and medicine. I just was one of the first people to recognize how interesting it is.
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People treat you one way when you're champion, but when you're not the champion, everything changes. People treat you different.
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Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists. The doctor/psychiatrist figures in my writing are alter egos of a kind, what I would have been had I not become a writer - a personal fantasy that I've fed into my fiction.
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If the would-be writer studies people in their everyday lives and discovers how to make his characters in their quieter moods interesting to his readers, he will have learned far more than he can ever learn from the constant presentation of crises.
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I've always been interested in violence, even as a teenager. I loved 'Helter Skelter' and books like that.
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Try all things, hold fast that which is good.
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There are some jobs in which it is impossible for a man to be virtuous.
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Medicine involves dealing with people who are going through changes and cycles, often people trapped in bodies that are going out from under them. Spending time with them lets you think their way, gives you insights as a writer.
