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When I went for my medical school interview, I had an old paperback of 'Henderson the Rain King' in the pocket of my coat. I was wearing the best clothes I had - a pair of cords and a sport coat - but when I got to the office, all the other interviewees were lined up in their black suits.
Ethan Canin -
Bausch is a wonderful storyteller. He's a mature writer who has a lot of confidence in the quality of character. He doesn't need to hook you with a sneaky plot and zany characters.
Ethan Canin
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Why say 'utilize' when you can say 'use'?
Ethan Canin -
I never set out to be a published writer.
Ethan Canin -
Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.
Ethan Canin -
The short story can't really hold an interesting event. It can't hold a death or a war or a loss of great magnitude the way either a long story or a novel can.
Ethan Canin -
I have a very bad memory. I can't remember my own life very well.
Ethan Canin -
If you're concentrating so damn hard on a piece of mathematics or a musical - a piece of music or a piece of art, the restraint that holds the rest of - the rest of the world back off and vanishes in the rest of your life.
Ethan Canin
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I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.
Ethan Canin -
I don't want to be movie-star famous. I want to move people with my writing.
Ethan Canin -
My idea of teaching literature is just to read great passages aloud or to look at it the way a writer does, which is what I try to do. Which is to say, 'How does this writer do this? How did he order his scenes? Do you notice any pattern to his sentences?'
Ethan Canin -
What's more interesting than the arc of lives?
Ethan Canin -
I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.
Ethan Canin -
Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.
Ethan Canin
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John Cheever was the first writer I ever read who sort of had that similar sensation that, you know, life is nasty, miserable, brutish and short, but that occasionally, there's a certain river of light, a kind word, a telling gesture that sort of illuminates something.
Ethan Canin -
If you write a page a day in couple months you have a good chunk of the book and then after a year you have almost a book. It's not that...hard.
Ethan Canin -
I no longer practice medicine, but I can say that, for me, medicine was easier - and certainly less emotionally turbulent - than writing.
Ethan Canin -
It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there.
Ethan Canin -
'How does your life turn out?' That's the ultimate novelistic question to me.
Ethan Canin -
When you're in medicine - especially when you're a resident in a public hospital - you feel like you're doing your part. But not when you're a writer.
Ethan Canin
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Fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition, small disappointed hope.
Ethan Canin -
You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.
Ethan Canin -
I like medicine. Even if I was selling a million books a year, I would still be a doctor.
Ethan Canin -
You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.
Ethan Canin