Ethan Canin Quotes
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I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.
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What's more interesting than the arc of lives?
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Fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition, small disappointed hope.
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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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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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When the narrator says, 'This is a story without surprises,' most of the time, this is not what happens.
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A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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Fame is a problem of perspective.
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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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I don't think success makes one confident. I think it has more to do with character than circumstance.
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I don't think there is such a thing as pure imagination. I think it's a combination of memory and invention.
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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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People are surprised when Hollywood characters act the way a real person would.
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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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I think one of the things that is essential for happiness in life, or at least for non-sadness, is producing something. I guess that's why I spend so much time and agony writing books. But working on carpentry is sort of like all the pleasure with none of the agony.
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If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.
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I was never writing for commercial success. It's nice that it has come, but it is not important.
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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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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.