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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It's best make changes little by little, the same as you'd put clothes upon a growing child.
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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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If not for the success that medicine has made, I might be part of a much different story right now.
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Despite a certain amount of rhetoric, such as 'the second American Revolution,' there is a fair consensus about which events in the affairs of a people can rightly be called revolutions. It is also clear that such revolutions are proper objects of study for the historian.
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A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.
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I love horses.
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Each weekend I play at least one and maybe two sets of tennis a day. My doubles team was in the finals recently at my tennis club in Palm Beach and lost a tiebreaker after a three-hour match. I must confess, by the end of the three hours, I was relieved it was over.
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I enjoy an accumulating faith in weak forces - a weak faith, of course, easily shaken, but also easily regained - in what starts to drift: all the slow untrainings of the mind, the sift left of resolve sustained too long, the strange internal shift by which there's no knowing if this is the raod taken or untaken. There are soft affinities, possibly electrical; lint-like congeries; moonlit hints; asymmetrical pink glowy spots that are no the defeat of something, I don't think.
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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.
