Ethan Canin Quotes
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Politicians are already exaggerated. They're bigger than life in every way - their appetites, their ambitions, their personalities, their failings, their magnetism. In a sense, they're made for fiction.
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I don't think success makes one confident. I think it has more to do with character than circumstance.
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It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.
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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.
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You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.
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A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.
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I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.
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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.
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A ten- or twelve-page story seems too easy, which is a funny thing to say considering that writing a decent short story is devastatingly difficult. Yet it still seems easier than a novel. You can turn a short story on a single good line - ten pages of decent writing and one good moment.
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To have too much time is not good, you have to force yourself. And human beings aren't meant for true freedom. I've learned that, having had it.
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Why say 'utilize' when you can say 'use'?
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I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.
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I was born in Ann Arbor. I lived for a while in Ohio; Pennsylvania, California for 10 years, and now in Boston. And I lived in Iowa for a couple of years, where I studied at the Writers Workshop.
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The only successful way to write, and the only one I have found, is to be the character. Give up on trying to control them. Writers always talk about hearing voices. That's what they mean.
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People are surprised when Hollywood characters act the way a real person would.
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To me, point of view is everything.
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I don't have a pen name, so I'm thinking of getting a doctor's name. What would you call that, a stethoscope name?
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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.
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Families tend to artificially divide the world, imbuing one member with all the attributes and another with all the faults. But it's never that way.
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It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there.
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Fame is a problem of perspective.
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What's more interesting than the arc of lives?
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I'm fascinated by power, by those that can be publicly generous and privately ruthless.
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There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.