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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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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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 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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I don't go around thinking about regret; regret doesn't consume me as a person... I'm not certain about whether any writer, any artist, any musician, can write without regret, so I don't think perhaps it's even particularly Southern.
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I think the whole system of education would change if I were in charge and had the ability to make changes. I don't think I would keep Princeton exactly being Princeton.
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Life is full of chances and changes, and the most prosperous of men may in the evening of his days meet with great misfortunes.
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The notion that only those who preach the gospel of integrated medicine are able to perform the art of medicine is as ridiculous as it is insulting to everyone in healthcare who does his/her best to meet the needs of their patients. The assumption that unproven or disproven treatments become acceptable simply because they are often administered in a kind and caring fashion is quite simply not true.
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''Between you and me, sir, I'll have to see him before I'll believe he's invisible.''
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If you want to know how little your dignity is worth, take it to the pawnbroker.
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Unemployment rates tend to rise and fall in roughly equal proportion at all rungs of the ladder, and that happened between 1973 and 1985.
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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.
