Ethan Canin Quotes
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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.
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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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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.
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Your first book is kind of a labor of ignorance. You don't realize the difficulty of it. Your second book is sort of a labor of fear. Then you sort of either hit a stride, or you don't.
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In the winter, I read next to a wood-burning stove. In the summer, we have a place up in Michigan where I like to read in a hammock. It's almost entirely hidden by cedar trees and right up by the water. You can climb in there and see nothing but water and be seen by nobody. It's perfect.
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I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.
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There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.
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A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.
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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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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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It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.
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If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.
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Books were king, but now movies are king, and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live.
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When the narrator says, 'This is a story without surprises,' most of the time, this is not what happens.
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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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I teach a 14-week semester, and one of the things I do when I have to teach literature is, for the first half hour of the class, I have the students write the beginning of a new story every week. At the end of the semester, even if they have learned nothing about literature, at least they'll have 14 beginnings that they can take with them.
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Fame is a problem of perspective.
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I'm fascinated by power, by those that can be publicly generous and privately ruthless.
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There are some advantages to being a writer: you do generally get better as you get older. I think I understand things better. When I was a kid, I was kind of guessing at the emotion. Now I'm interested in writing more difficult books, books that confront the facts of life, of death and dying and failure - the majority of life. You write outwardly imaginative books when you're younger. When you're older you apply imagination to internal experience.
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People are surprised when Hollywood characters act the way a real person would.
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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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There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.
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I've written five books, a book every three years. I'm fairly lazy and it doesn't take that much...people who are not lazy are Isaac Asimov.
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I don't think success makes one confident. I think it has more to do with character than circumstance.